Chapter 37: Getting Out
The heavy equipment room door was doing its job, but every impact against it from the corridor outside was a reminder that it wasn't going to do that job forever. The sound came through in irregular intervals — heavy, deliberate, testing — and each one landed somewhere in the chest rather than just the ears.
The room smelled like concrete dust and machine oil and the particular brand of fear that comes from knowing something is on the other side of a door and waiting.
Will had been set down in the corner beneath the main console — the most protected spot available, walls on two sides, equipment blocking a direct line from the door. He was still under, breathing slow and even, completely checked out from everything happening around him. Joyce sat beside him on the floor with his hand in both of hers, not taking her eyes off his face. Checking his chest. Checking his color. Running the same silent inventory every thirty seconds.
Mike was on Will's other side, back against the console, watching the door and then watching Will and then watching the door again. He looked older than he had that morning.
Owens had found the facility's structural blueprints in a hard folder in the filing cabinet — FACILITY MANAGEMENT — STRUCTURAL DIAGRAMS — and spread them across the console under the emergency lighting. The paper was yellowed at the edges and the annotations were small, but it was something.
"Here." He put his finger down on their current location, then traced a route. His voice had the compressed quality of someone keeping themselves focused through effort. "Main exit — vehicle and personnel — is here. In terms of straight-line distance, it's not far. One corridor, down two floors, lobby."
Hopper leaned over the blueprint, reading it fast. "But."
"But the corridors between us and there are almost certainly not clear." Owens moved his glasses up. "And even if we made it to that door—" He paused. "The building has a full lockdown protocol. Power outage triggers automatic electromagnetic lock engagement on all primary exits. Anti-intrusion design. It cannot be forced from the inside."
"Could Andy get it open?" Hopper asked, not looking up from the blueprint.
Owens glanced at Andy. "Theoretically — if his ability is as precise as what I just saw in that corridor — he might be able to damage the lock mechanism or stress the door frame enough to break the seal. But doing that would be loud. Very loud. And we're trying not to advertise our location."
"What about remote unlock?"
Bob's voice came from somewhere behind the console, where he'd been quietly reviewing the blueprints himself. Everyone looked at him.
"Sure," he said, in the tone of someone who has looked at a problem and found the shape of it. "But someone has to physically reset the circuit breakers first. They tripped when the power went out."
"Where are the breakers?" Hopper asked.
Owens put his finger on the blueprint and moved it a long way down the page. "Basement. Three floors below us."
The room got quiet enough to hear the things in the corridor moving.
Hopper looked at the route. He looked at the door. He picked up the fire extinguisher.
Bob stepped in front of him.
"Jim. Hold on."
"I'm going to reset the breakers."
"Okay, and then what?"
Hopper blinked. "Then we leave."
"No, resetting the breakers just gets the power back on." Bob pulled the blueprint closer and pointed to the exit. "To actually release the door locks, someone has to restart the security system and manually override the lockdown code from a terminal." He looked at Hopper with the patient expression of someone explaining something for the first time without condescension. "Do you know BASIC?"
"I don't know what that is."
"Computer programming language," Mike said quietly from the corner, not making it a big thing.
Andy was standing near the shelving, listening. He knew his way around Lab equipment in a functional sense — what certain switches did, how monitoring systems worked — but computer programming was somewhere he'd never been taken. He stood with his arms crossed and said nothing and felt useless in the specific way of knowing you can't solve the current problem.
"Teach me," Hopper said to Bob.
Bob gave him a look. "Jim, I could teach you French in less time. And I don't speak French."
He turned to Owens. "Doctor — BASIC?"
Owens had the grace to look slightly embarrassed. "No."
Bob absorbed this, then straightened up and let out a long breath.
"All right." He didn't say it dramatically. Just the quiet acknowledgment of someone who has identified the task and is deciding to do it. "Then it's me."
"Bob—" Joyce was already moving toward him.
"Hey." He turned to face her and put both hands on her shoulders, gentle but solid. The joking tone was there, but under it something that wasn't a joke at all. "Bob Newby, superhero. Remember?"
Joyce held it together for about two seconds. Then she stepped forward and hugged him — tight, brief, her face pressed into his shoulder. She pulled back and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and nodded.
"I'll go with you."
The voice was Andy's.
He'd stepped forward without entirely deciding to, standing at Bob's elbow and looking up at Hopper with an expression that was calm and clear and not asking permission so much as making his case.
"No," Bob said immediately, and reached over and ruffled Andy's hair with the automatic affection of someone who'd spent the last hour watching this kid fight off monsters. "It's going to be rough down there. You stay here, keep Hopper company, protect Will and Joyce."
"I can protect you on the way." Andy moved his head out from under Bob's hand, not rudely but with focus. "I can sense them before we reach them. I can clear the path if something's there. And—" He looked at Hopper directly. "I can stay in contact with you the whole time. You'll know exactly what's happening. If we hit something we can't get through, we pull back. You'll know the second that changes."
He meant the mental transmission. Hopper understood immediately — had been thinking about it already, probably.
A real-time channel between a kid heading into a monster-infested basement and the people three floors up trying to hold a locked room. That wasn't nothing. That was actually significant.
Hopper looked at Andy for a long time.
He'd spent the better part of four years keeping this kid out of exactly this kind of situation. He'd built the whole arrangement around the idea that the best thing he could do for Andy and for Eleven was to keep them invisible — keep their names off every list, keep their abilities hypothetical, keep them somewhere no one was looking. He'd lost an argument with Andy just yesterday about something related to this and the argument still sat in his chest like a stone.
But he looked at the door and he thought about Bob going down three floors alone into whatever the Lab had become, and he ran the honest math.
He exhaled.
"Okay." His voice was rough. "You go. Together." He crouched down so they were at eye level, and his expression didn't leave room for negotiation. "But listen to me. If something happens down there that you can't handle — anything — you leave the mission and you come back up here. Not after you try one more thing. Right then. You understand me? You can fail. You can't not come back."
Andy nodded. The relief in his face was quick and genuine.
Bob clapped a hand on Andy's shoulder and told Hopper, "I'll look after him."
Then he turned more serious. "Once the doors are open—"
"I'll get them out," Hopper said. "We'll be at the main entrance. If you're not out by the time we're clear—" He didn't finish it, but the meaning was plain. He'd come back in.
Andy stepped forward and hugged Hopper.
It caught Hopper off-guard in the way that Andy's direct gestures always did — no preamble, no warning, just the full commitment of it. Hopper's arms came around him a beat later and he held on for a moment, one hand on the back of Andy's head.
"Andy." He kept his voice low. "I've always been in your corner. Every day. You know that."
Andy nodded against his shoulder. Pulled back. Didn't trust himself to say much so he just met Hopper's eyes and let that be enough.
They made it to the basement without incident, which felt like borrowed luck and probably was.
The power distribution room was large and industrial — rows of breaker panels, cable conduits running floor to ceiling, the smell of hot metal and insulation. Emergency lighting threw everything in orange shadow.
Bob went straight to the main breaker panel like he'd been here before. He probably hadn't, but schematics and blueprints translated into spatial understanding for him in a way that was useful right now.
"Ready?" He had both hands on the main switch — a heavy red handle, insulated grip, built for a deliberate throw.
Andy was facing the door, his attention spread outward through the walls. "Corridor's clear right now. Something moving in the distance but it hasn't fixed on us. Go ahead."
Bob threw the switch.
The noise was significant — a heavy industrial clang, a burst of sparks from the panel — and then the hum started. Low at first, building from inside the walls, traveling up through the conduits and into the ceiling, the sound of a massive system powering back up from nothing. The emergency lighting cut out for half a second and came back as full main lighting — sharp, white, filling the room instantly.
Every indicator on every panel blinked on in sequence. Green. Red. Green. The relay switches clicked through their startup sequence like a row of dominoes.
Three floors up, the surveillance room came alive. Monitors flickered on across the console, static resolving into real-time feeds — corridors, labs, stairwells, the lobby, the parking lot. And one camera covering the power distribution room, showing Bob at the panel and Andy at the door, both intact.
"There!" Mike pointed at the screen before the image had fully sharpened.
Owens exhaled properly for the first time in a while.
In Hopper's head, Andy's voice arrived clean and direct: We're good. Power's on. Bob's at the terminal now.
Hopper straightened up. "They did it," he said, and the tension in his face shifted into something that was still worried but no longer the specific kind of worried that comes from not knowing.
Bob had already moved to the old terminal in the corner — green monochrome screen, mechanical keyboard, the kind of computer that had been cutting-edge five years ago. He sat down, cracked his knuckles once out of habit, and his fingers started moving across the keyboard with a speed and confidence that looked completely out of place in the situation.
He was in his element. It was almost funny, given everything.
The cursor blinked. Lines of code scrolled. Bob worked through it with the focused calm of someone who has done this kind of thing a hundred times and is trusting that muscle memory to carry him through the part where his hands would otherwise be shaking.
Andy kept his attention on the door, the corridor, the floor above them, trying to map what was moving and where.
Then Bob hit Enter.
He leaned back. Let out a long breath through his nose. Turned and looked at Andy with a tired, genuine smile.
Andy's voice went to Hopper immediately: Get ready. The doors are opening.
The response in Hopper's chest was audible enough that Joyce looked at him.
"They did it." He was already moving toward the equipment room door. "Let's go. West stairwell, stay together, move fast—"
"Wait." Owens was staring at one of the monitors. "West stairs. Look."
On the screen: a Demogorgon moving through the stairwell in a slow circuit, nose down, tracking something.
The timing hit Andy and Hopper almost simultaneously. Andy's voice arrived in Hopper's head a half-second after Owens pointed at the screen: Hopper — west stairs aren't clear. We can see it from here.
Bob was already back at the keyboard.
"Give me fifteen seconds," he said, and pulled up a different interface.
On the surveillance monitor, the fire suppression sprinklers in the west stairwell and the adjacent corridor activated all at once. The footage showed water dropping in sheets, the sound of it audible through the camera microphone. The Demogorgon in the stairwell reacted immediately — startled by the noise and the sudden change in the environment, it moved away from the stairs and deeper into the corridor, following the disturbance.
The stairwell was clear.
"Now," Hopper said. He had Will over his shoulder and was already at the door.
He took one last look at the monitor showing Bob and Andy. "Get out safe," he said, to nobody in the room, and then led Joyce and Mike and Owens out into the corridor at a run.
"Maintenance tunnel on the east side," Bob said, unfolding the blueprint section he'd memorized. "Comes out on the first floor, close to the main entrance. This way."
They moved fast, Andy point, Bob close behind.
Andy kept his perception spread as wide as he could maintain it while also running — a radius of awareness that covered the spaces around them and reported back in impressions rather than images. Corridor ahead, clear. Branch to the left, something large but stationary. Service passage, nothing.
Thirty feet from the exit door, he stopped.
Bob pulled up instantly, reading Andy's body language.
Andy held up one finger. Made a stay gesture. Moved forward alone to the corner, went still, and looked.
He came back to Bob and shook his head once, held up one finger, pointed around the corner.
Bob pressed himself against the wall.
Andy went around the corner.
The Demogorgon had its back to him, head down, interested in something on the floor. Andy's right hand came up, fingers spread, and the telekinetic grip closed around its neck before it had fully registered that something was in the room with it.
He twisted his hand.
The sound was brief and final.
The creature dropped.
Andy stood there for a second with his hand still slightly raised, then lowered it and looked back at Bob.
Bob came around the corner, saw what was on the floor, and his eyes went to Andy with an expression that was part shock and part something that was working very hard to stay practical. He swallowed. Nodded. Kept moving.
They were twenty feet from the exit when three more came out of the dark.
Two from the front, one from a side door that came off its hinges.
Andy had read the one in the side corridor a fraction of a second early — he'd felt the impact of its weight on the floor before it hit the door — and the push he put on Bob was fast enough that Bob was already moving sideways when the door blew off its frame and the creature's jaws closed on empty air.
Bob hit the floor and rolled and looked up.
The third creature hung suspended in the corridor, all four legs moving, getting nowhere. Andy had it by the back of the neck with the same invisible grip, holding it six inches off the ground.
He swung his arm.
The creature went sideways into the wall and left a dent in the concrete and didn't get back up.
The other two came at him simultaneously from opposite angles. Andy spread both arms and pushed outward, one on each side, with everything he had behind it.
They hit the walls at the ends of the corridor with a sound like a car accident.
One went through a door. One hit the fire safety cabinet hard enough to buckle the metal casing and slid down.
The corridor was quiet.
The exit door opened from the outside.
Hopper stood in the frame with a handgun he'd found somewhere — standard security sidearm — and his eyes moved over the corridor and landed on Andy, then Bob getting to his feet, then the three shapes on the floor.
He fired twice into the far shadows where something was still moving, then stepped back and held the door.
"Let's go. Both of you. Now."
Andy grabbed Bob's arm and they ran the last twenty feet and came through the door into the cold night air.
Jonathan's car was already there.
He'd come to check on Will and Mike — he and Nancy both, Nancy in the passenger seat with her hands white on the dashboard, both of them looking like they'd arrived at a party they hadn't been invited to and it had turned out to be something else entirely.
Joyce didn't waste time on explanations. She had Will over her shoulder with Mike helping and she got in the back seat and the door shut and Jonathan had the car moving before anyone finished a sentence.
The old engine sounded like it was being asked to do something it was technically capable of but had strong opinions about, and then they were through the Lab's gate and on the highway and the facility was behind them and getting smaller.
In the parking lot, Hopper and Bob were already at their cars.
And then Hopper saw the rest of them.
Steve Harrington was standing near his car with the particular expression of someone who had followed a situation past the point of reasonable return and was now committed to it. Next to him — Dustin, Lucas, Max, and Barb, who had apparently come with Nancy.
They'd followed Dustin's lead, probably. The specifics could wait.
"What are you doing here?!" Hopper's voice had the quality of a man who was furious and also did not currently have time for fury. He scanned them fast, did a headcount, and made the call. "Steve, Barb — with me. Everyone else, Bob's car. Right now. Byers house. Go."
Nobody argued. Steve grabbed Barb and got into the back of the cruiser. On the other side of the lot, Bob already had his sedan running, and Dustin was yanking the back door open, and Lucas and Max piled in behind him.
Hopper backed out of the space and pulled through the gate and the convoy moved out onto the highway — Jonathan's car ahead, Hopper's cruiser behind, Bob's sedan last — headlights cutting through the dark Indiana road, the Lab's exterior lights shrinking in every rearview mirror until they were gone.
Andy sat in Hopper's passenger seat.
He didn't say anything for a while. He watched the road and felt the particular kind of empty that comes after burning through everything you have and coming out the other side.
In the back seat, Steve looked at the back of Andy's head and at the cowboy hat sitting on the dashboard and decided — correctly — that now was not the time for questions.
The cars drove on through the dark, toward the Byers house, toward something that felt enough like safety to matter.
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