The sound of the truck tires squealing against the pavement cut through the heavy tension that settled inside the car, complete with that of the teenagers trying to catch their breath as Hopper sped after Jonathan's car, pulling them as far as possible from Hawkins Lab. The sound of the smaller Demogorgons had faded from earshot, though they knew that, whatever the monsters had gotten up to after leaving them at the junkyard, it couldn't have been anything good.

"Is everybody okay?" Hopper finally asked after a while, breaking the silence in the truck as he glanced back at them in the rearview mirror.

"We're fine," Anna said, looking around at where she'd been shoved into the backseat with the others. Dustin was sitting in her lap and Becca's elbow had somehow found its way lodged between her ribs, but for the time being, they were safe. "What happened in there?"

"It was an ambush." Hopper said, anxiously drumming his hands on the steering wheel as they paused for a red light. "Damn monsters took over the lab, they knew exactly where to find us."

"How?" Becca asked. "How'd they know where you were?"

"Will," Hopper said solemnly. "It brainwashed him somehow, poor kid didn't even know who Joyce was anymore."

At the mention of his best friend's name, Anna could see a heartbroken expression cross her brother's features, though he quickly shrugged it off, trying to put on a brave face. "How'd you get out?"

"Bob Newby got the doors open," Hopper explained. "We sedated Will so that thing wouldn't know where we were going. We got the kids out, Will, Mike, and Michelle, but they got Bob right before we could escape."

"They got Bob?" Landon echoed. "Like... Sandy's dad, Bob?"

Hopper nodded solemnly, making eye contact with Landon in the rearview mirror, and Anna's heart began to sink into the pit of her stomach as she thought about the smiley blonde girl who'd sat across the table from her at lunch just a couple of days prior. While Anna hadn't had the opportunity to meet Bob, she'd heard plenty of stories from Sandy and Michelle, and knew how much Joyce had grown to care for the man over the past few months.

"Where were you kids tonight?" Hopper asked then. "How'd you wind up at the lab?"

"Dustin kept a Demogorgon as a pet." Lucas spoke up from his spot squished between Becca and Landon.

"That is grossly oversimplifying things, Lucas." Dustin protested.

"Oh, is it? My bad." Lucas retorted sarcastically.

"Thank you," Dustin said, sighing before looking back up at Hopper. "After Halloween, I found a small creature in our garbage can. I thought I was discovering a new species, but he continued to grow, and yes, turned out to be a Demogorgon. Anna and I trapped him in our cellar, but he broke out, so we found Steve and tried to trap him at the junkyard. Everyone else met up with us to try and trap him, but they ambushed us, too, until something stopped them. That's when we followed the sound back to the lab and ran into Steve and Nancy."

Hopper's gaze found Dustin in the rearview mirror, a bewildered expression on the older man's face, but he remained silent, continuing to drive and simply shaking his head at a loss for words. When he finally turned off the main road to find Steve's car by the train tracks, they couldn't have piled out of the vehicle fast enough, the teenagers nearly crawling over one another to get out of the cramped space while the younger kids waited behind.

"Straight to Byers'," Hopper ordered, and Steve nodded once in the chief's direction in agreement. "If you four even think about going off on your own hunting again like last time, I will arrest you, is that clear?"

"Yes, Chief," they chorused, piling into Steve's BMW as Hopper started the truck back up, already en route to the Byers household.

Steve turned the key in the ignition, the engine roaring to life as Anna buckled up her seatbelt. Steve wasted no time in shifting the gear into drive, and they weren't far behind Hopper and the kids as they sped through the streets on the outskirts of town.

"Oh god, do I miss the days where I thought you all were batshit crazy," Landon sighed, leaning back against the headrest. "What are the odds we survive the night?"

"You saw those things back in the junkyard," Becca pointed out. "And you heard about what happened to Sandy's dad. If it's us against all of them?"

"Yeah, we're toast," Landon cursed under his breath. "Just so ya'll know, I postponed a date with Chrissy Cunningham to be here tonight, so if I die I'm going to be extremely pissed."

"You need to just man up and ask her to be your girlfriend already, dude," Steve chimed in, glancing over at where Landon sat in the passenger seat. "She'd be stupid not to say yes."

"You really think so?" Landon asked, looking back over at Steve.

"Dude," Steve gave Landon a knowing look. "I've seen the way she looks at you, even from across the cafeteria. Trust me, she'll say yes."

Despite the only light being the faint glow coming from Steve's radio, and the streetlights outside, Anna could just make out the faintest dusting of pink over Landon's cheeks as he looked back out the window. Although, as they followed Hopper's truck down the driveway to the Byers residence, the mood shifted, finally sinking into place just what they were up against.

By the time they climbed out of the car, Hopper had already made a beeline into the house, with the kids hot on his heels. As Anna shut the car door behind her, she looked up to see a lone figure sitting on the porch, arms wrapped around her knees as her chin rested on top of her arms.

"Michelle?" Becca called out, and at the sound of her voice, Michelle looked up, jumping up to her feet as Becca and Anna hurried over to her.

"We were so worried," Anna sighed in relief as the two pulled Michelle into a hug, and the girl between them sniffled, reaching a hand up to wipe the tear that had fallen down her cheek.

"Fair warning, the house is a mess," Michelle said, sniffling. "After the incident Will had out on the field, he hasn't been the same since. He started drawing all of these random lines, but they all connected, making a map of Hawkins. We took him to the lab for tests, and that's when everything happened. Bob, he-"

"We know," Anna assured her. "Hopper told us in the car. Are you okay?"

"I will be," Michelle said, forcing a smile, but it quickly faded away. "It's Will I'm worried about. He's sedated, they've got him on the couch, but there's no telling what'll happen next."

"Well, come on," Becca suggested, gesturing back towards the house. "We're safer inside."

The girls nodded, following Becca up the porch steps and into the house. Michelle had been right, nearly every surface of the walls and floor were covered in pieces of paper, all scribbled over with different colors of crayons. In each room, the others gathered in small groups, though Anna could hear murmuring coming from the living room, where Jonathan sat stroking the hair of an unconscious Will, with Nancy standing behind them.

"Sam Owens," Hopper's voice came through from the other room, and they walked into the kitchen to see him leaning impatiently against the wall with the phone pressed to his ear, with Steve standing nearby, arms crossed over his chest. "Dr. Sam Owens... I don't know how many people are there! I don't know how many people are left alive... I am the police! Chief Jim Hopper... Yes, the number that I gave you, yes. Six seven, six seven. I will be here."

The phone met the receiver again with a sharp clang as Hopper set it back on the receiver, and he ran a frustrated hand over his beard, sighing. "They didn't believe you, did they?" Dustin asked from where the kids sat at the kitchen table, watching the scene before them.

"We'll see," Hopper said simply.

"'We'll see?'" Mike shouted incredulously. "We can't just sit here while those things are loose!"

"We stay here, and we wait for help." Hopper insisted, shooting Mike one final look before trudging out of the room.

A heavy silence fell over them as he left the room, leaving them all to ponder the events of the night so far, and the scary unknown of what else they still had yet to uncover. Slowly, the adrenaline began to wear off from the younger kids, and Anna could see Mike visibly deflate as his eyes wandered the rest of the house. What the poor kid had been through the past couple of days with Will in the lab, Anna wasn't sure she even wanted to know, but she hadn't the faintest clue of how to help her brother's friend.

The others watched as Mike slowly rose from his spot at the kitchen table, wandering over to the coffee table in the living room. "Did you guys know that Bob was the original founder of Hawkins AV?"

"Really?" Lucas asked.

Mike turned back around to face the rest of them. "He petitioned the school to start it and everything. Then he had a fundraiser for equipment. Mr. Clarke learned everything from him. Pretty awesome, right?"

"Yeah," Dustin and Lucas both agreed.

"We can't let him die in vain." Mike insisted.

"Well, what do you want to do, Mike?" Dustin snapped. "Alright, the chief's right on this. We can't stop those Demodogs on our own."

"Demodogs?" Max echoed curiously, shooting Dustin an amused look.

Dustin nodded. "Demogorgon... dogs," he mimicked one on each hand before placing both of them together. "Demodogs. It's like a compound. It's like a play on words-"

"Okay," Max assured him, nodding.

"I mean when it was just Dart, maybe," Dustin continued.

"But there's an army now." Lucas pointed out.

"Precisely," Dustin agreed.

"His army," Mike murmured, eyes widening.

Steve looked over at Mike with a confused expression. "What do you mean?"

"His army," Mike repeated, though the others continued to watch him with lost expressions. "Maybe if we stop him, we can stop his army, too."

Mike rushed out of the room, and Anna exchanged a brief glance with Steve before the rest of them followed suit, hurrying out of the kitchen and down the hallway to Will's bedroom. Even on the other end of the house, the wall was still covered in Will's makeshift map of Hawkins, but Mike breezed past everything on the walls, instead picking up another piece of paper from the boy's desk, and holding it up for them to see.

The drawing was done in black crayon, though it appeared to have come straight from a nightmare. The creature looked almost like a giant spider, but it stood on the ground appearing to reach up to the sky, taller than every tree Will had drawn below it, or any house Anna had ever seen in Hawkins. Black clouds covered the sky behind it, although lightning covered the sky in streaks of red, the only flash of color present within the drawing.

"The shadow monster," Dustin observed.

"It got Will that day on the field." Mike explained. "The doctor said it was like a virus, it infected him."

"So this virus, it's connecting him to the tunnels?" Max asked.

"To the tunnels, to the monsters, to the Upside Down, everything." Mike confirmed.

"Whoa, slow down, slow down." Steve interjected.

"Okay, so the shadow monster's inside everything." Mike explained. "And if the vines feel something like pain, then so does Will."

"And so does Dart," Lucas added.

"Yeah," Mike nodded. "It's like what Mr. Clarke taught us. The hive mind."

"Hive mind?" Steve echoed, confused.

"A collective consciousness," Dustin explained. "It's a super-organism."

"And this is the thing that controls everything," Mike continued. "It's the brain."

Dustin's eyebrows raised. "Like the Mind Flayer,"

Lucas snapped his fingers as the kids fell into a shocked silence, Dustin exchanging a look with Anna as the two of them realized what it was they were looking at. However, Becca, Steve, Max, and Landon all looked at the rest of them with lost expressions, the only D&D experience any of them had ever come close to having was that of Becca being coerced into having a movie marathon with Anna in the Hendersons' living room while Dustin sat in the kitchen with his friends, the boys loudly going over a new monster manual Mike had picked up from a gaming store during a trip to Indianapolis.

"What?" the others chorused.

"Hold on," Dustin said, breaking apart from the group and moving over to Will's bookshelf, where he began to rummage through before finding a game set with Dungeons & Dragons printed on top.

Dustin opened the box, pulling out a game manual before leaving the room, the others left hot on his heels as they followed after him back into the kitchen. Inside, Hopper had already returned, and Jonathan and Nancy had joined him, the three of them watching the parade of newcomers with curious glances. Dustin rifled through the pages of the book before a satisfied smirk crossed his face at finding his target, and he slammed the book down on the table in front of them.

"The Mind Flayer," Dustin said, gesturing to where a drawing of the creature was etched near the bottom of the page, along with the creature's statistics.

"What the hell is that?" Hopper asked.

"It's a monster from an unknown dimension," Dustin explained. "It's so ancient that it doesn't even know its true home. Okay, it enslaves races of other dimensions by taking over their brains using its highly-developed psionic powers."

"Oh my god, none of this is real." Hopper reminded him. "This is a kids' game."

"No, it's a manual," Dustin pointed out matter-of-factly. "And it's not for kids. And unless you know something that we don't, this is the best metaphor-"

"Analogy," Lucas corrected.

"Analogy," Dustin deadpanned, glaring at Lucas. "That's what you're worried about? Fine, fine! Analogy for understanding whatever the hell this is."

"Okay, so this mind flamer thing-" Nancy started.

"Flayer," Dustin corrected. "Mind Flayer,"

"What does it want?" she asked.

"To conquer us, basically." Dustin explained. "It believes it's the master race."

"Like the... like the Germans," Steve pointed out, but Dustin simply looked back at him with an incredulous expression.

"Steve," Becca sighed, raising a hand to her mouth to hide her smirk.

"Like the Nazis?" Dustin asked.

Steve sighed. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Nazis," he said sheepishly.

"Uh, if the Nazis were from another dimension, totally." Dustin assured him. "It views other races, like us, as inferior to itself."

"It wants to spread, take over other dimensions." Mike added.

"We are talking about the destruction of our world as we know it." Lucas said gravely.

"That's great," Steve said sarcastically, running a hand through his hair as he began to pace the room. "That's great, that's really great."

"Okay," Nancy mused, studying the manual still sitting before them. "So if this thing is like a brain that's controlling everything, then if we kill it..." she trailed off, looking back up at Mike.

"We kill everything it controls." Mike finished.

"We win," Dustin concluded.

"Theoretically," Lucas added.

"Great," Hopper said, taking the manual from Nancy. "So how do you kill this thing? Shoot it with Fireballs or something?"

"No, no, no Fireballs," Dustin chuckled. "Uh, you summon an undead army, uh, because..." he looked up to see Hopper's gaze leveled on him, and instantly began to falter. "...because zombies, you know, they don't have brains, and the Mind Flayer, it... it... it likes brains." he sighed. "It's just a game. It's just a game."

"What the hell are we doing here?" Hopper sighed, slamming the manual shut and tossing it back onto the kitchen table, turning away from the group.

"I thought we were waiting for your military backup?" Dustin called after him.

"We are!" Hopper insisted.

"Well even if they come, how are they gonna stop this?" Mike asked. "You can't just shoot this with guns!"

"You don't know that!" Hopper snapped. "We don't know anything!"

"We know it's already killed everything in that lab." Mike pointed out.

"And we know the monsters are going to molt again." Lucas added.

"And we know that it's only a matter of time before those tunnels reach this town." Dustin said.

"They're right," Joyce's voice joined the mix, and Anna looked over her shoulder to see Mrs. Byers standing in the hallway, a solemn, defeated expression on the woman's face. "We have to kill it. I want to kill it."

"Me too," Hopper assured her, walking over to her. "Me too, Joyce, okay? But how do we do that? We don't exactly know what we're dealing with here."

"No," Mike spoke up, wandering into the living room where a sedated Will still slept peacefully on the couch, the calm in the midst of the storm they'd all found themselves in the middle of. "But he does. If anyone knows how to destroy this thing, it's Will. He's connected to it. He'll know its weakness."

"I thought we couldn't trust him anymore," Max pointed out. "That he's a spy for the Mind Flayer now."

"Yeah," Mike agreed, turning around to face the rest of them. "But he can't spy if he doesn't know where he is."