Suspicious Minds (Stranger Things Novels #1)(41)

Terry’s throat closed. She needed to talk to him, make it better somehow…

But there was nothing to say that could.

“Look,” he said, “we have now. We just have to focus on that.”

She swallowed, nodding. “Shouldn’t I be comforting you?”

“I can come up with some ideas about how.” He waggled his eyebrows.

She gave him a little shove. “How can you be funny at a time like this?”

He shrugged. “What good is it being anything else?”

Fair enough—not that any of this was fair. They went back inside, and Dave only cried once more. Terry stayed over, her thoughts constantly returning to the question of how long they had left.





2.


Alice floated through space. She’d wondered if her feet needed to touch the ground in the Beneath, where the monsters lived and her friend screamed. They didn’t, of course. Feet weren’t how you navigated in a dream, especially an acid-and electricty-fueled one.

She’d been hoping to conjure another vision of Terry, still unsure if it was hallucination, truth, or some sideways version of both…If she could see it again, maybe she could figure it out.

But her mind wasn’t cooperating.

Dry leaves drifted in the windless air like she did, surrounded by grabbing branches and overgrown vines tearing at crumbling walls. Everything was soft, hazy like being trapped in a dream…

Or a trip, she thought.

A door hanging, broken, cracked wood split in two like the pieces of a cartoon heart. Beyond it, an empty playground from somewhere she knew. School? Church? Then it, too, was gone. Indistinct images cycled behind through her head for a seemingly endless while. What did they mean? Nothing Alice understood…And no Terry.

But there was a face she recognized.

Brenner’s.

She focused until he wasn’t so blurry. Lines at the corners of his eyes. Cruelty at the corners of his mouth.

In front of him a rail-thin girl with brown hair clipped short as a boy’s in a hospital gown like the one Alice had on, a metallic helmet with wires running out of it on her head.

What in the world?

The girl tore off the cap of wires. Alice saw numbers on the girl’s forearm. 011.

What was she witnessing? Yes, “witness” was the right word. She felt like a witness. Like someone intended to bear witness. An Indigo child, just like Terry had said. The girl had to be.

Suddenly Alice was in a long hallway, and, far at the end, the girl lifted a filmy hand and flung a man in an orderly costume into the wall hard. How was that possible?

The vision began to fade. And then it vanished.

Alice opened her eyes to her own room at the lab, the machine that made the electricity being rolled away.

“This place is evil,” she said, before she could swallow it. She thought of that young girl with the worst of the bad men. Brenner. What had he been doing to her? And was what she’d seen real?

Dr. Parks didn’t argue with her statement. She slid a finger around Alice’s wrist, a light circle tethering her to the here and now. “I’m going to take your pulse.”





3.


Terry hated coming to the lab this week, more than ever. She hated being away from Andrew when every moment felt like the last one. It wasn’t—he still had some time before he’d realistically be called to report for his physical and begin the process of enlisting, let alone be sent to Vietnam—but it felt that way.

Brenner gave her a cup of bitter liquid, which she downed. She stuck her hand out for the usual tab of LSD and Brenner handed it over. She placed it on her tongue, ignoring the slightly chemical taste.

“Something wrong?” Brenner asked. The concern in his voice like he cared. Right.

Terry would ask him soon about the girl, about the children. Her heart was too wobbly this week, her brain too focused on Andrew. She didn’t feel strong enough for another battle, if the questions turned into one. She spat the tab out, and dropped it into the small garbage can provided.

“Nothing I want to talk about.”

She’d never been overly clingy. In high school, she’d mostly been someone who got serial crushes on boys she was convinced had hidden depths (they never did). The shocking thing about Andrew was that she’d expected him not to be interesting. Stacey had casually mentioned she thought they’d like each other. When she introduced them, Terry got even more skeptical. He was too pretty, with those long eyelashes and that brown mane of his, his impeccably clean car. His off-campus apartment. She’d expected him to turn out to have either an awful personality or a boring one. To be a groping, messy kisser or a snoozefest who only talked about himself.

But Andrew talked about politics, the news, about books. About music. He asked Terry how she was. He listened to the answer. He cared about the world and he cared about her. He was an excellent kisser. She’d felt comfortable with him from the first minute.

They’d never talked marriage or long-term. A quiet understanding had built between them, though. The two of them together worked.

They needed to have a bigger talk, about what this meant for them as a couple…Terry knew that. But she wasn’t ready and she wouldn’t force it on Andrew. She’d just sit here, taking a psychedelic journey, and obsess. Oh joy.

“Lie down,” Brenner said, cutting into her thoughts like a knife.