Chapter 17: The Day Before
November 5, 1983.
One day.
The number didn't echo anymore. It screamed.
Morning came 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 basement workbench at 6 AM, checking the detector one last time. 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, emergency 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 seemed 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 fragmented memories—those glimpses of other timelines—whispered warnings. Every time I'd interfered directly at this moment, something worse happened. Someone else died. The timeline corrected itself with brutal efficiency.
Some 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. Medical supplies. Everything they'd need if they got trapped there.
Cache Four (Library): Minimal but updated. Cash in waterproof bag. Emergency contacts. A note in code only The Party could read: If you're reading this, things went wrong. Rally at Cache Five.
Cache Five (Home Basement): My bunker. The heart of the operation.
I spent two hours checking everything. Weapons mounted and accessible. Medical supplies organized by urgency. Food and water for two weeks. Communication equipment. 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, meets 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 met them at my house. Emergency protocols review. One final briefing before tomorrow.
"If something happens," I said, leading them to the basement, "if one of you is in danger or sees something strange—you call me immediately. 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 times."
"Then hearing it the twenty-first time won't hurt." I pulled out laminated cards—emergency contact list, cache coordinates, simple code phrases. "Keep these on you. Memorize them. If phones don't work or you can't talk freely, the codes communicate what's happening."
Dustin studied his card. "Code Indigo means dimensional breach detected. Code Violet means injury requiring immediate attention. Code Black means—" His voice dropped. "Code Black means someone'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 me. Waiting for truth I couldn't give.
"I know something tears through from the other dimension," I said carefully. "I know it will take someone. 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 means 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 homes, carrying laminated cards and the weight of preparation that was about to become 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 someone still breathing.
I didn't stalk him obviously. Just... observed. From a distance. Memorizing.
He left school at 3:15, biked home alone. Spent an hour in his room drawing—I could see him through the window, hunched over his notebook, creating images of the dark dimension he'd soon be trapped in.
Joyce came home at 5:30, hugged him tight. They ate dinner together—spaghetti, I could smell 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 become a nightmare.
I could stop it. Follow him home after D&D. Drive him myself. Put myself between him and the Demogorgon.
But those fragmented timeline memories screamed warnings. The last time I'd tried direct interference at this moment, Dustin had died instead. The time 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 basement, running through kata exercises to burn nervous energy, when the device began emitting irregular beeps. Not the steady alarm from the lab perimeter—this was scattered, almost panicked.
I grabbed it, checked the readings. Fluctuating wildly. Electromagnetic chaos building somewhere northeast.
The gate. It's starting.
I grabbed my gear—night vision goggles, compass, camera, 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 screamed.
Constant alarm, readings maxing out, the device physically hot in my hands from processing dimensional 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 shimmer 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 melting from dimensional 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 plummeted. My breath fogged. Frost spreading across dead leaves in patches that formed patterns—organic, wrong, purposeful.
Midnight.
The world tore.
Not visually. Not dramatically. Just a moment where physics stopped making sense. Where the air tasted like metal and ash. Where that fold in space became 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 somewhere in that bleeding moment, the Demogorgon would cross over. Would hunt. Would find Will Byers biking home 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 home.
But the timeline memories screamed. Fixed point. Fixed point. Don't interfere.
The moment 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 something 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 home 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 home, parked in my driveway, walked to my basement 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 me, 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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