Chapter Text
Prologue
March 21, 1991
Eddie slapped his right arm, trying to get a vein to pop. Shooting up with his left hand was difficult, but the veins in that arm were toast. Even the nurses at the free clinic couldn’t find a usable vein in his left arm for the blood draws that got him clean syringes every month.
All the times he’d shared needles in the years since he’d fled Indiana, it was a miracle that he still tested clean.
Eddie wanted to go out peacefully, on the hazy high of a hot shot, not slowly and painfully withering away, a pariah both in the hospitals and on the street.
Eddie had been feeling Death’s cold breath on the back of his neck for a while now.
Maybe this would be the hit that finally did it.
If his last court-ordered stint in rehab had been better timed, maybe it could have stuck. But right after he got out, 30 days clean and sober, there had been more reports of horrible events that radiated out from his damned hometown.
Catastrophic earthquakes, groups of people disappearing, and “monster” attacks that started as fodder for the Weekly Watcher were now mainstream news.
It was all Eddie’s fault somehow; these disasters that were spreading steadily across the country. No counselor, doctor, or support group would ever convince him otherwise.
As much as Eddie hated Hawkins, he never bought into the “this town is cursed” nonsense: not after the boy who died and then came back, not after the weirdness at the government lab, not even after the fire that killed so many people in a mall that should have been empty and shut down for the night.
Today was exactly five years since everything in his already pretty lousy life went completely to shit. Five trips around the sun, 1826 days since he’d brought the pretty cheerleader to his trailer to get her high and maybe make her laugh again. Five years since he’d watched her bones break and her beautiful blue eyes shrivel in their sockets before she had fallen lifeless to the floor.
That made him a believer.
When it happened, Eddie ran. Got in his van and headed for the horizon. He didn’t think about his uncle coming home to find the mangled girl on the living room floor. Didn’t think of Chrissy’s friends and family or of the cops wanting an explanation. He didn’t even think about what could happen to him when the body was found. He just ran in fear and panic.
He was outside Denver when both his body and his ride started to give out. He white knuckled the van to a truck stop off I-70, parked in the huge lot, and stretched out in the back to get some much-needed sleep. Eddie woke nearly a full day later and headed into the restaurant in search of something cheap to fill his growling belly. A TV in the diner was flashing his picture and a description of his van, saying he was wanted for questioning in the horrible ritual murders of several teenagers. That he should be considered unstable and extremely dangerous.
What the fuck!
Eddie detoured to the restrooms, shut himself in a stall, and used his pocketknife to hack off his long hair. He turned his Hellfire shirt inside out and put it on backwards to hide the logo. He unclipped the chains from his jeans. Eddie rolled up just about everything that could identify him in his beloved leather jacket and buried it in the bottom of the men’s room trash can. Then he headed out to hitch a ride going in any direction away from Indiana.
As he walked through the parking lot, he found a dirty hoodie abandoned next to a big rig. Eddie put it on and hoped he’d be anonymous enough to avoid any vigilantes looking to bag themselves a Satanic cultist murderer.
Eddie avoided any news about Hawkins for a whole year, a year that actually went pretty well. There had been some money hidden in the van, so he had a small cushion when he wound up in LA. He picked up some thrift store clothing and got an off-the-books job as a barback. The under-the-table pay wasn’t bad, and it kept his name from appearing anywhere the government might see it. Once he had some money saved, he bought a cheap acoustic guitar and busked in the subway and around tourist attractions.
It would have been an okay existence if you discounted the horrors that traipsed through his dreams every night. But about a year in, Eddie wanted to know what had happened to his uncle and his friends. He wanted to see if he was still number one on the most wanted list in his hometown.
The public library in LA was amazing. They even had the Indianapolis newspaper to read.
The only good news he found was that the feds had stepped in after the massive earthquake (a quake in Northern Indiana! That should have shown everyone that Hawkins was cursed). The authorities pointed the finger at somebody named Henry Creel as the murderer. Eddie was off the hook but presumed dead. Lots of people were presumed dead, their bodies swallowed by the rifts in the ground or the fires that followed. Eddie searched the casualty lists.
Jeff, Gareth, Grant – presumed dead.
Lucas and Erica Sinclair – confirmed dead.
Dustin Henderson – presumed dead.
Wayne Munson – confirmed dead.
His life had been a steady downward spiral ever since.
The needle pricked his vein, and Eddie waited for the sweet oblivion of heroin to waft him away for as long as he could manage to stay high.