Chapter Six: Crazy Train

 Chapter Six: Crazy Train

            Ruth used to hate being body-slammed on the mat. For that matter, she used to hate the whole wrestling gimmick from the start. She was only in it for the stardom – to be recognized for the talented actress she knew she was. But, after a while, it all began to feel right to her. Wrestling was basically acting intermixed with sports.

            Her friend, Debbie, had the same epiphany when she went to one wrestling event. And now, as “Liberty Belle” (the in-ring rival of Ruth’s “Zoya the Destroya”), she was just as much in it as Ruth.

            The cheer of the fans brought smiles to the faces of both women.

            Of course, most of those cheers were for Debbie/Liberty. They especially roared over the Irish whip she reversed on Ruth/Zoya right into the turnbuckle. Ruth feigned pain while leaning against the turnbuckle; it gave her the chance to catch her breath while Debbie posed for the crowd. Despite being the heel to Debbie’s face character, Ruth could not have been prouder of her best friend.

            “Kick her butt, Liberty!” one overeager fan in the crowd screamed.

            Ruth looked past the ropes to see that it was a curly-haired kid sitting with four other boys in a row closest to the ring. One of them forced him into sitting back down, evidently embarrassed or ashamed (Ruth couldn’t figure out which).

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            “You wanna just announce to Nancy and Jonathan that we’re here, Dustin?!”

            Dustin couldn’t understand why Mike was so upset over his cheering until he heard him mention his sister and Will’s brother. “Oops,” he muttered. “Sorry, Mike. I forgot about them.”

            Steve tried to pretend like he wasn’t with them but that wasn’t so easy with the notable absence of Si. He acknowledged the presence of Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will long enough to ask, “Hey, where is Si? She’s been gone for like half an hour.”

            “I dunno,” Mike passively answered, too focused on the match. “Lucas was the last one who saw her.”

            “Do you know where she is?” Steve asked Lucas.

            “Who knows, who cares?” Lucas answered in such a dismissive way. It was clear how angry he still was with Si over the incident with Billy Hargrove earlier in the lobby. As far as he was concerned, for the rest of the evening, Si didn’t exist. The GLOW match happening in the ring was the perfect distraction from all his troubles.

            At least, it was before he heard a familiar voice.

            “Get up, Zoya! You better not lose this match! I bet twenty bucks on you!”

            The condescending, mousey voice that he associated with his little sister, Erica Sinclair, shouted to the heavens right behind him. He dared not to turn around to see if it was actually her and not just another ten-year-old who sounded like her.

            Unfortunately, for Lucas (who did turn around), it was in fact Erica.

            “What are you doing here?!” he asked her. “Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

            “Isn’t it time you died?” Erica fired back.

            As far as Lucas could tell, she wasn’t there with any of her friends or even their parents. She came to the bingo hall entirely by herself. “Mom and Dad are gonna kill you when they find out you came here by yourself,” Lucas warned her.

            “Well, they won’t, ‘cause I’m not here by myself,” Erica refuted. “It just so happens that Uncle Jack got tickets and invited me to come. So, what are you doing here with your nerd friends?”

            Steve noticed the way she looked at him along with Mike, Will, and Dustin.

            “Oh, no, no, no,” Steve protested. “Don’t put me in with them. I’m only here because of my date.”

            “Oh, yeah?” the disbelieving Erica remarked. “And where is she?”

            Steve sunk in his seat. “Good question.”

            “That’s what I thou—”

            BOOM!

            Out of nowhere, two creatures busted out from beneath the ring, knocking Liberty Belle and Zoya the Destroya into the ropes and turnbuckle from shock. The cheers of the crowd turned into perplexed murmurings, some believing the devil bounty hunter and squid man fighting each other to be part of the show.

            Of course, Mike, Dustin, Will, Lucas, and Steve knew what was really going on, having recognized the devil bounty hunter to be Hellboy. As far as the squid man he was battling it out with…that was something new to them.

            “Hey!” a man in the crowd yelled. “I came here to see chicks duke it out, not a couple of freaks!” He then hurled his tub of popcorn at the head of the squid man, a move that the creature was not at all pleased with. It retaliated by taking the battered, bloodied body of Hellboy and throwing him into the section of the crowd that the popcorn-throwing spectator was.

            This act spread panic across the bingo hall, with everyone rushing for the exits.

            Steve, the boys, and Erica were the only ones that remained. At least, that’s what they figured to be the case before they noticed that Nancy and Jonathan, as well as Max Mayfield, stayed put also.

            “Oh, crap!” Mike exclaimed, but not because of the terrifying monster in the broken wrestling ring. Nancy and Jonathan were looking directly at him and Will. Of course, the roar of the squid man trounced any scolding Nancy or Jonathan could’ve thrown their way, urging the youths to join in on the evacuation.

            Seeing how Max was still sitting, Lucas told her, “What’re you doing? We’ve gotta get out of here!”

            “Jeez, you guys are so gullible,” Max calmly said. “It’s wrestling! They’re wearing costumes…ones that look pretty real!”

            “That’s ‘cause they are real!” Lucas yelled. “Now move!”

            He grabbed the baffled Max by the arm, forcing her out of her seat and leading her safely out into the lobby with the others.

            Just when they thought they were free of trouble, things only got worse when they bumped back into Nancy and Jonathan, who also ran into Jim Hopper and Joyce Byers, who ran into Mike and Will.

            The scene that proceeded afterwards was unbelievable, considering the situation.

            Joyce, who had no idea that her sons attended the GLOW event, scolded her eldest for not keeping his little brother away. Jonathan defended himself, not having any idea Will was even there until that very second, only being there for Nancy. However, Nancy argued that she was there for Jonathan, thinking he was into the GLOW show from all the discussions he had about it. But she dropped that argument in favor of reprimanding Mike, who she cannot believe lied to their mother about going to the movies when he was instead at the GLOW show.

            The family squabble abruptly ended just as Si approached them.

            “And where have you been?” Steve asked her.

            Soon after she caught her breath, Si frowned at Steve and wittingly returned, “You guys didn’t see the giant squid dude?”

            “Yeah, we did,” the less-than-amused Jim replied. “You wanna tell us where it came from?”

            “Is it from the Upside Down?” Lucas inquired.

            His inquiry drew confusion from Max. “The what-now?!”

            “It kinda did, but it’s not from there,” Si clarified. “The Doctor’s somewhere here in the building. We need to get to him before Vilgax does.”

            “Who’s Vilgax?” Nancy asked.

            “Who’s the Doctor?” Joyce also asked.

            “Uh…guys?” Dustin directed their attention all on him. “Some creepy-lookin’ goths are starin’ right at us.”

            Si looked over the group to see what Dustin was talking about. Her hazel-blue eyes widened in horror when she realized it was a team of Death Eaters, led by the cruelly insane Bellatrix Lestrange. Without a single explanation, Si frantically encouraged to her Hawkins friends, “Everybody run! Now!”

            They trusted the experienced Time Lord enough to follow her lead, running in the opposite direction of the Death Eaters. They didn’t get far as soon as the two GLOW wrestlers, Liberty Belle and Zoya the Destroya, collided with them, running away from the ensuing brawl between Hellboy and Vilgax that spilled into the lobby.

            Hellboy had been beaten, his body skidding to a halt at the feet of Si and the Hawkins squad.

            “If that squid dude took him out, we’re seriously in trouble,” Steve freaked.

            Steve looked to be correct in his presumption with Vilgax and the Death Eaters surrounding Si, Hellboy, and the Hawkins squad at both ends of the corridor. And, just as the otherworldly villains were about to pounce…

            “Hello, hello!” a voice spoke over the intercom, accompanied by intense feedback. “Can anyone hear me? This is the Doctor and I…am…talking!”

            Jim frowned at the British-accented voice. “Who is that?”

            “That, Jim, would be the Doctor,” Si beamed.

            “To the witch and the man with the squid for a head, I should warn you that if you are thinking of harming the Gladiator and her friends, then you should’ve counted on one important thing: me!”

            Immediately after the Doctor’s pronouncement, what sounded like a TARDIS dematerializing reverberated throughout the lobby. Vilgax and the Death Eaters curiously looked on as the people they believed to have trapped were encased in the ghostly outline of a tall, blue British police box. It solidified momentarily, engulfing Si and her companions, before vanishing completely.

            “What just happened?” Vilgax snarled.

            “You lost them,” Bellatrix reproached, pointing to Vilgax with her wand. “Wait ‘til the Great One hears of your blunder.” The mad witch proceeded to taunt her Chimera Sui Generis accomplice in a singsong voice, chanting over and over again, “He’s going to kill you!”

            Infuriated, Vilgax intended on driving his sword through her.

            Bellatrix noticed this and readied her wand.

            The two villains would have surely gone at each other right there and then, had it not been for the human that walked right in between them, calling out for someone named “Max.”

            Little did they know this specific human was Billy Hargrove, who had been separated from his stepsister during the evacuation. Except now, he was the object of interest for Vilgax and Bellatrix, who seized in making the best out of a bad situation.

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            “Did we just die?”

            Dustin asked the question that rang through the minds of his fellow Hawkins residents upon seeing the new area that they had found themselves in. It looked like the console room of a TARDIS, similar to Si’s, only more copper. A young man wearing a bowtie and tweed jacket stood on the console platform with a young black man who went to Si as soon as she appeared.

            “You alright?” he asked her.

            “I’m fine,” Si told Jake, “but Hellboy…” She looked down on her battered half-demon companion, who rested on her lap. “He needs medical attention.”

            “I have a med bay you can take him to,” the Doctor said before pointing towards one of the many doors that led out of the console room. “Take a right out that door and it’ll lead you down a hallway that you’ll take a left at the end of. From there, you’ll go downstairs, then go up the stairs, until you reach an intersection. Take another left and you’ll find the med bay.”

            Hopper’s head spun just listening to the impossible instructions. “D-Do you have some sort of directory around we can follow?”

            “Don’t worry, mate,” Jake told Hopp, with a friendly pat on his back. “I know my way ‘round the place.” He assisted Jim, Steve, Nancy, Joyce, and Jonathan in lifting Hellboy up off Si’s lap and carrying him to the TARDIS med bay.

            “O.K., somebody better start telling us where we are,” the frenetic Debbie Eagan demanded.

            Just now realizing that Liberty Belle and Zoya the Destroya were onboard the TARDIS with them, Mike looked on the Doctor in astonishment and said, “You brought them with us?!”

            “Of course I did,” the Doctor proudly replied. “They’ll be helpful in our mission.”

            Ruth scowled at the bizarre Englishman. “What mission?”

            “Doctor, you don’t seriously think these ladies can help us in stopping Cthulhu, do you?” Si questioned.

            “Are you joking?” the Doctor said. “After the remarkable show of might I saw them put on in that squared stage back at the bingo hall, why wouldn’t I enlist in their help?”

            His praise of Ruth and Debbie seemed misplaced.

            “You’re talking about our wrestling?” Ruth interpreted his reference.

            The Doctor’s face dropped as he gazed at them. “Wrestling?!”

            “Yeah, we’re performers,” Debbie clarified to him. “None of that stuff is real.”

            The Doctor stood beside the control console in total humiliation, which he then hid with condemnation. “Well, that would’ve been useful information to know before I took you out of your dimension!”

            Si snickered at him. “I’m impressed you’ve managed to upgrade this old Type-40, Mark 3 to even get around the infinite dimensional corridor.”

            “Oh, I haven’t upgraded it…not yet,” the Doctor negated. “I’m just using your TARDIS as a temporary generator, hooked into the mainframe of my TARDIS, to get us where we need to go.”

            Now Si was truly impressed. “You mean my TARDIS is here inside yours?!”

            “May I interrupt this geek exchange to ask what’s goin’ on?” Max interjected. She specifically asked Lucas, Dustin, Mike, and Will, “Who are these people and this weird place they brought us to?”

            “I was about to ask the same thing,” Erica said.

            Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will flew into a thorough recap that began with the events of last Halloween, during Will’s disappearance. They elaborated on Si’s alien background, being from a parallel dimension and coming to theirs through the pocket universe referred as “The Upside-Down.”

            Despite the explanation, Max and Erica thought the whole thing to be ridiculous.

            “You expect us to believe all that?” Erica rebutted.

            “You’ve seen it all for yourself,” Dustin said. “How can you not believe it?”

            “This is crazy,” Max uttered. “I’m ridin’ on the Crazy Train!”

            “We’re there with you, sister,” Debbie concurred, speaking on behalf of Ruth and herself.

            “Crazy is what we excel in,” Si remarked. “But, like it or not, we’re in this tog—”

            Her sentiment was cut short just as she clasped her throat, gasping for air as she collapsed to the floor. The others rushed to her aid, lost on what was happening to her and how they could help. Luckily, the attack only lasted for a second before it passed.

            “You didn’t tell us you have asthma,” Dustin said.

            “That wasn’t an asthma attack,” Si told him. “It was a chronological attack.”

            “What’s that?” Will asked.

            “Something’s happened to one of my past lives – something that threatens my very existence.” Si then turned to the Doctor and said with the utmost emergency, “We need to hurry over to 1929 Louisiana.”