November 5, 1983.
One day.
The number didn't echo anymore. It scread.
Morning ca cold and sharp, frost on the grass outside my window. The kind of day that felt ordinary—people going to work, kids catching buses, life continuing its mundane rhythm. But underneath, reality was tearing itself apart.
I stood at my basent workbench at 6 AM, checking the detector one last ti. Readings elevated but stable. The compass pointed northeast with steady insistence. Everything waiting. Holding its breath.
Today is the last day of the before. Tomorrow starts the after.
I grabbed my car keys.
The supply caches needed final checks. All five locations, one last verification before the world changed.
Cache One (Quarry): Hiked down in pre-dawn darkness, pulled the container from its hiding spot. Added fresh batteries—twelve D-cells, packaged against moisture. Swapped old food bars for sealed MREs. Checked the nail-wrapped bat for rust. Everything functional. Everything ready.
Cache Two (Mirkwood): The most critical location. Where Will would vanish tonight. Where the gate would briefly open.
I buried additional supplies—extra flashlights, first aid, ergency blankets. The container held enough for three kids to survive three days in hostile conditions. Maybe longer if they rationed.
The woods felt wrong even in daylight. Silence too deep. Birds avoiding the area. The trees themselves seed to lean away from a point about thirty yards ahead—the exact spot where reality would tear open in approximately eighteen hours.
Should I be here when it happens? Try to grab Will before the Demogorgon takes him?
But the fragnted mories—those glimpses of other tilines—whispered warnings. Every ti I'd interfered directly at this mont, sothing worse happened. Soone else died. The tiline corrected itself with brutal efficiency.
So events are fixed points. This might be one of them.
I finished the cache upgrade and left.
Cache Three (Junkyard): The bus where the kids would eventually fight demo-dogs. I'd positioned supplies both inside the vehicle and in a buried container nearby. Weapons. Food. dical supplies. Everything they'd need if they got trapped there.
Cache Four (Library): Minimal but updated. Cash in waterproof bag. Ergency contacts. A note in code only The Party could read: If you're reading this, things went wrong. Rally at Cache Five.
Cache Five (Ho Basent): My bunker. The heart of the operation.
I spent two hours checking everything. Weapons mounted and accessible. dical supplies organized by urgency. Food and water for two weeks. Communication equipnt. Maps. The isolation tank filled and ready if we needed to boost Eleven's range.
Eleven. She should appear in about forty-eight hours. Escapes the lab, ets the boys, changes everything.
The preparations were complete. Three years of planning, training, positioning. Every possible advantage I could create.
Now I just had to wait for the disaster to start.
The Party - 3:00 PM
School ended and I t them at my house. Ergency protocols review. One final briefing before tomorrow.
"If sothing happens," I said, leading them to the basent, "if one of you is in danger or sees sothing strange—you call imdiately. Day or night. You don't investigate alone. You rally with the others. You use the cache locations if you're separated from adults."
Mike's impatience radiated off him. "We know this. You've told us twenty tis."
"Then hearing it the twenty-first ti won't hurt." I pulled out laminated cards—ergency contact list, cache coordinates, simple code phrases. "Keep these on you. morize them. If phones don't work or you can't talk freely, the codes communicate what's happening."
Dustin studied his card. "Code Indigo ans dinsional breach detected. Code Violet ans injury requiring imdiate attention. Code Black ans—" His voice dropped. "Code Black ans soone's taken or dead."
"Yeah."
Lucas pocketed his card without looking at it. "Do you know exactly what's coming? Not theories. Not guesses. Do you actually know?"
The question hung in the air. Four faces watching . Waiting for truth I couldn't give.
"I know sothing tears through from the other dinsion," I said carefully. "I know it will take soone. I know the lab is involved. Beyond that—we figure it out as it happens."
"But you have suspicions," Mike pressed. "About who gets taken."
Will. It's Will. And I'm going to let it happen because trying to prevent it breaks everything.
"Everyone stays alert. Everyone watches each other's backs. That's all that matters."
Will had been quiet, sketching in his notebook as usual. He looked up. "It's starting tonight, isn't it? That's why you're doing final checks. Why you look like you're going to a funeral."
Smart kid. Too perceptive.
"I think the breach might happen tonight, yeah. Which ans tomorrow we wake up to a different world. So tonight—be with family. Be safe. And be ready."
They left at 4 PM, scattered to their hos, carrying laminated cards and the weight of preparation that was about to beco necessity.
I was alone again. Waiting.
Will Byers - 5:00 PM
Following Will Byers through his final day of normalcy felt like attending a funeral for soone still breathing.
I didn't stalk him obviously. Just... observed. From a distance. morizing.
He left school at 3:15, biked ho alone. Spent an hour in his room drawing—I could see him through the window, hunched over his notebook, creating images of the dark dinsion he'd soon be trapped in.
Joyce ca ho at 5:30, hugged him tight. They ate dinner together—spaghetti, I could sll it from my car parked three houses down. Normal family dinner. Last one for a while.
At 6:45, Will biked to Mike's house for their D&D campaign. I followed at a distance, watching his small figure navigate the streets confidently. Happy. Unaware that in approximately two hours, his entire life would beco a nightmare.
I could stop it. Follow him ho after D&D. Drive him myself. Put myself between him and the Demogorgon.
But those fragnted tiline mories scread warnings. The last ti I'd tried direct interference at this mont, Dustin had died instead. The ti before that, the gate had opened directly under Mike's house and killed everyone inside.
Fixed point. Will's abduction was a fixed point.
Or I'm just a coward, telling myself stories to justify letting a kid get kidnapped.
I drove away before I could change my mind.
The detector started acting strange around 10 PM.
I'd been in my basent, running through kata exercises to burn nervous energy, when the device began emitting irregular beeps. Not the steady alarm from the lab periter—this was scattered, almost panicked.
I grabbed it, checked the readings. Fluctuating wildly. Electromagnetic chaos building sowhere northeast.
The gate. It's starting.
I grabbed my gear—night vision goggles, compass, cara, the detector. Threw them in my car and drove toward Mirkwood.
The streets were empty. Hawkins at night, quiet and oblivious. Families watching TV. Teenagers at parties. Everyone living normal lives while reality prepared to split open.
I parked near the woods at 11:47 PM. Thirteen minutes until midnight.
The detector scread.
Constant alarm, readings maxing out, the device physically hot in my hands from processing dinsional overflow. I switched it off before the sound carried, then pulled on the NVGs and walked into the woods.
The compass pointed dead ahead. Unwavering. Certain.
I found the spot—the exact place where Will's bike would crash tomorrow morning. Where the gate would briefly breach. Where everything started.
And reality was already wrong.
Through the NVGs, I could see distortions in the air. Like heat shimr but cold. Patches of space that bent light incorrectly. The trees near the spot leaned away as if pushed by invisible wind.
The detector in my hand began vibrating. Then smoking.
"Shit—"
I dropped it as the casing cracked. Circuitry inside lting from dinsional energy overload. The device died with a final electronic whine, smoke curling from vents.
My watch read 11:58 PM.
Two minutes.
The air pressure changed. Dropped suddenly like before a storm. My ears popped. The compass in my pocket grew warm against my hip.
One minute.
The distortions intensified. Space folding wrong. I could almost see through—into darkness and decay on the other side. The Upside Down, pressing against our reality like a prisoner against cell bars.
Thirty seconds.
The temperature plumted. My breath fogged. Frost spreading across dead leaves in patches that ford patterns—organic, wrong, purposeful.
Midnight.
The world tore.
Not visually. Not dramatically. Just a mont where physics stopped making sense. Where the air tasted like tal and ash. Where that fold in space beca a wound that bled darkness.
A gate. Small. Temporary. But open.
I could feel it. Feel the wrongness pouring through. Feel the Upside Down leaking into our world like poison into water.
And sowhere in that bleeding mont, the Demogorgon would cross over. Would hunt. Would find Will Byers biking ho alone and drag him screaming into hell.
I could warn Joyce. Call the house. Tell her to pick up her son instead of letting him bike ho.
But the tiline mories scread. Fixed point. Fixed point. Don't interfere.
The mont passed. The gate sealed itself—temporary breach closed. Reality snapped back to almost-normal. The distortions faded. The unnatural cold lifted.
But the damage was done. The barrier between worlds had been breached once. It could be breached again. And sothing from the other side had crossed over.
I stood in the dark woods, holding a broken detector, and felt three years of preparation slam into horrible reality.
It's started. It's actually started.
I walked back to my car on numb legs. The dashboard clock read 12:17 AM.
November 6, 1983 had begun.
Will Byers was currently riding his bike ho from Mike's house. In approximately fifteen minutes, he would reach this spot. In approximately sixteen minutes, he would vanish.
And I was going to let it happen.
I drove ho, parked in my driveway, walked to my basent like a man in a dream. Sat at my workbench surrounded by weapons and supplies and three years of obsessive preparation.
And waited for the phone to ring with news that a twelve-year-old kid was missing.
Please forgive , Will, I thought. Please let this be the right choice.
But the broken detector on my workbench offered no answers. Only silence.
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