The Stranger Things Obsession Finally Won

Eddie scowled at him. It was the Monday after he had spent an uncharacteristic amount of time in the Hawkins Library's collection of newspaper records, and he was ready to get a few more sets of eyes on the evidence he had collected.

"No, Gary, I'm not kicking them out, and if you keep up this attitude, the next wizard you fight will spend all his spell slots polymorphing you into a sheep forever." Eddie didn't add that he was slightly afraid that Harrington might come after him with a horror movie weapon if he wronged said freshmen. He took a centering huff of breath before continuing, "But this meeting is about them."

"You're still fixated on figuring out their big secret, huh?" Jeff said, sounding almost bored.

"There's something weird going on!" Eddie shouted, jabbing a finger at his notebook. "I ran into Harrington at the junkyard on Friday and he-"

"What were you doing at the junkyard?" Brian asked at the same time Jeff asked "Why was Harrington at the junkyard?"

Eddie huffed in annoyance. "Can I finish?" Gareth rolled his eyes, but otherwise the boys refrained from interrupting again. "I went to the junkyard on Friday to smoke and plan the next campaign, and Harrington was there, making sure there were no rabid dogs or something."

"Why-" Jeff started, but Eddie shot him a warning glare.

"I convinced him to tell me part of the story with him and the freshies, he acted like he didn't give me many details because he's 'not very good at explaining things' but I knew he was just hiding the juiciest parts."

Eddie chewed his thumb nail and looked away from his friends, still thinking. He didn't realize how long he had been silent until Brian piped up. "...And? What did he tell you?" He prompted.

Eddie looked back up, then flipped open his notebook. "He listed off all these recent incidents in town." He pointed to each one in his notebook as he spoke, circled and connected to each other like some kind of spiderweb. "Will Byers disappearance/death/reappearance. The first suicide in Hawkins in 20 years, which-" at this his finger hovered over a scribbled note that read Benny Hammond, Nov 7th, 1983 "happened the day after the Will Byers thing, by the way."

"Weird coincidence." Jeff offered.

"But is it a coincidence?" Eddie leaned in and he realized, vaguely, that he was starting to sound like some kind of paranoid conspiracy theorist. He cleared his throat and relaxed his tense posture. "The next day, Barbara Holland goes missing from Harrington's party and is deemed a runaway until a year later, when it's revealed she was actually killed by some kind of chemical leak from Hawkins Lab."

Jeff tilted his head, brows pinched. "I thought the chemical leak was last year? Weren't all the farms with rotting crops because of that?"

"Exactly!" Eddie nearly pounced at him out of his chair. "Two separate chemical leaks from the same place almost exactly a year apart? It's fishy, don't you think?"

Brian squinted at him, unimpressed, "So, what? You think they weren't chemical leaks?"

Eddie tilted his head in assent. "That's one theory, or..." he pointed to another note scribbled on the page, "the lab isn't really doing 'Department of Energy' experiments, they're doing other shady stuff."

Brian eyed the notebook and said. "So, what's up with the rabid and/or wild dogs?"

Eddie huffed in annoyance. "I don't know! Maybe they're like, genetically engineering weird animals to unleash on the Soviets or something." He rolled his eyes. "How am I supposed to know the details of a secret government experiment, genius?"

Eddie sighed in frustration. He glanced over his notebook again. After his post-junkyard chats with Harrington, he had hastily jotted down all of the details he could remember and circled them in bubbles, connecting them with lines and arrows through is haphazard research at the library, like some kind of demented flow-chart. Skimming over the page now, he tried to organize his thoughts, but was interrupted when Gareth jabbed a finger at the bubble labelled 'Starcourt'.

"What does the mall have to do with anything?" He asked, almost petulantly.

"Other than the fact that it burned down just a few months after it opened?" Jeff adds thoughtfully.

Eddie groaned and pressed his knuckles into his eyes. "Ugh, I don't know! It was one of the things Harrington mentioned, but when I tried to dig into it more, all I could find was about its opening, or the heroes, Chief Hopper and Harrington himself, of its demise."

Gareth quirked an unimpressed eyebrow. "Its heroes?"

"Hopper, who died in there, and Harrington who got brutally maimed, apparently in order to help other people escape." Eddie crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. "Which fits with what Wheeler was saying a while ago."

Eddie could feel another detail trying to come to the surface of his mind. Something else related that he definitely was told by someone, but can't quite grasp the what or the who. He chewed the inside of his cheek and rummaged through his brain to figure out what it was as the conversation carried on around him.

"Heroes." Gareth scoffed. "Based on whose account? Those kids that practically worship him?" He rolled his eyes. "So he got a little banged up. A lot of other people just died."

A somber silence settled over the table for a moment as everyone seemed to think back to the tragedy that had consumed the town for the remainder of the summer. Eventually, they all seemed to snap back to themselves as if nothing had happened.

"You know, now that you mention it, I think I remember seeing Harrington at Melvald's a couple days after the fire," Brian mused, "looked like he'd lost another fight with Hargrove."

Hargrove. Eddie's brain snapped to attention. Max's haunted eyes as she recounted her nightmares. 'Or, it’s the mall. And Billy doesn’t- he lets Jane die.' Eddie furrowed his brow in thought. Seemed like Harrington and the Chief weren't the only ones doing some life saving that night.

He sunk lower in his chair, unnoticed by his friends. It seemed like every new clue he got only lead to more questions.

Who is Jane? What were they all doing at the mall that night, instead of going to the fair like literally every other person between the ages of 10 and 18? Why would saving people from a fire lead to injuries similar to losing a fist fight? How is any of this connected to anything else?

Eddie covered his face with his hands. He had to be missing something. Something big.

He sprung back into the conversation, sitting up and leaning back onto the table with a swiftness that made his friends start.

"What are we missing?" He asked, searching each of their faces for any semblance of an idea. When all he got in response was varying levels of blankness and confusion, he sighed and looked back to his notebook, as if something new might have appeared in the 5 minutes he looked away from it.

He blinked at it a few times. While there was nothing new on the page, he seemed to notice a pattern that he hadn't before. All of the bubbles and arrows... in some way or another they all seemed to circle back to-

"The lab!" Eddie exclaimed, which earned him curious looks from the others.

When Eddie didn't elaborate, Jeff probed, "What about the lab?"

Eddie's brain was flying a mile a minute. Scheming. Plotting. He grinned mischievously. "It's completely abandoned now, right?"

Jeff shrugged. Brian and Gareth exchanged a glance that was unreadable to Eddie, but he didn't care. He steepled his fingers together in a fashion similar to when he was setting up a particularly tricky puzzle during one of their campaigns.