Chapter 4: The Second Extraction
June heat turned the basement into a sauna.
I didn't care. Six hours of training daily, sometimes more, pushing the limits of what this teenage body could handle. Push-ups until my arms shook. Bag work until my knuckles split. Knife forms with wooden practice blades until the movements became meditation.
Fight Master absorbed everything. Every technique from every grainy VHS tape locked into permanent muscle memory. Boxing combinations. Krav Maga basics. The brutal efficiency of knife fighting. My body adapted faster than humanly possible—muscles developing definition that should have taken years, bones hardening, reflexes sharpening.
I was becoming a weapon.
And today, after exactly one hundred days, my other power finally recharged.
The Dimensional Backpack hummed in the back of my mind—not a sound, more like a pressure building behind my eyes. Fully charged. Ready.
I stood in the basement, shirtless and sweating, and reached into empty air beside my hip. The space there felt different, receptive, like dipping my hand into water that wasn't quite real.
My fingers closed around something solid.
The extraction happened instantly. One moment, nothing. The next, I was holding a red canvas bag with a white cross stitched onto the front.
Emergency medkit.
I set it on my workbench and unzipped it slowly, cataloging contents: antiseptic wipes, gauze pads, medical tape, scissors, tweezers, a thermometer, latex gloves, and three small tubes of... something. I unscrewed one and sniffed.
Medicinal. Herbal. Definitely not from any pharmacy I'd ever seen.
Advanced healing salves, the knowledge whispered. Minor wounds close in minutes instead of days.
I tested it immediately. Grabbed a razor blade from my toolbox, made a small cut across my forearm—shallow, just enough to bleed. Applied a small amount of the salve.
The stinging stopped within seconds. I watched, fascinated, as the cut visibly knitted together. Not instant healing, but accelerated. What should have taken a week happened in under ten minutes, leaving nothing but a faint pink line that would probably disappear by tomorrow.
"Holy shit."
The backpack had reset to zero. I could feel it—that pressure gone, replaced by emptiness slowly filling one percent per day. One hundred days until the next extraction.
Unless I found a dimensional gate. The knowledge suggested proximity to the Upside Down would accelerate charging. But that was a problem for later, when the gates actually existed.
For now, I had twelve items in this medkit. Twelve guaranteed uses of healing technology that shouldn't exist.
I packed everything carefully back into the bag, then carried it upstairs to my room. The compass went in my closet. The medkit needed to be accessible but hidden.
Under my bed, I'd built a false bottom into one of the storage containers. The medkit fit perfectly beneath a layer of old sports equipment. Anyone searching would see tennis rackets and forgotten baseballs, nothing more.
Two items now. Compass and medkit.
And ninety-eight more chances to extract potentially game-changing equipment over the next twenty-seven years—if I lived that long.
The hardware store clerk looked bored as I loaded supplies onto the counter.
Waterproof containers. Paracord. Industrial flashlights. First aid supplies to supplement the medkit. Butane lighters. Water purification tablets. Emergency blankets.
"Camping trip?" the clerk asked, scanning items mechanically.
"Something like that." I paid with money my parents left—three hundred dollars on the kitchen counter with a note saying they'd be in London for six weeks. Guilt money. Absence money. Money that said "we know we're bad parents but here, buy whatever you want."
Fine. I'd buy survival supplies and stash them around town for when the world went to hell.
The clerk bagged everything. "You need rope? We got fifty-foot coils on sale."
"Yeah. Two of those."
By the time I left, I'd spent nearly two hundred dollars on gear that would seem paranoid to anyone who didn't know what was coming. But I knew. I'd seen the demo-dogs tear through flesh. Watched the Mind Flayer possess half the town. Seen what happened when people weren't prepared.
Never again.
I loaded everything into the trunk of Steve's car—a Camaro I rarely drove because I was still adjusting to having a vehicle that was legally mine. Then I spent the next week establishing my supply caches.
Cache One: The Quarry
Forty feet down the walking path, where the rock formations created a natural shelf hidden from casual view. Waterproof container sealed with duct tape, containing: two flashlights, first aid supplies, emergency blanket, lighter, water purification tablets, fifty feet of rope.
I marked the location on a disposable camera photograph, then buried the container beneath loose rocks and dirt.
Cache Two: Mirkwood Path
Near where the forest trail intersected with the perimeter of Hawkins Lab property. Container hidden inside a rotted log: flashlight, basic first aid, emergency food bars, lighter, twenty feet of paracord.
This cache was closest to where the gate would eventually open. High risk, high reward.
Cache Three: The Junkyard
Behind the bus where, in the original timeline, the kids would fight demo-dogs with Steve wielding his famous nail bat. Container wedged beneath rusted car parts: two flashlights, extensive first aid supplies, rope, three emergency blankets, lighters, water tabs.
Cache Four: Library Basement
Mrs. Crane let me help reorganize storage boxes one afternoon, never noticing when I slipped a small container behind forgotten encyclopedias from the 1960s. Contents: compact first aid kit, lighter, cash in a waterproof bag, list of emergency contacts.
Cache Five: Home Basement
My own bunker, constantly expanding. The largest cache by far—weapons, training equipment, supplies I could access easily. The others were fallback positions. This was headquarters.
I photographed each location using the disposable camera, developed the film at a one-hour photo place two towns over where nobody knew me, then created a coded map in my journal.
Five strategic positions around Hawkins. Five chances to survive when everything went wrong.
Training intensified.
With the house empty for six weeks, I had total freedom. No parents to ask why their son spent hours in the basement. No interruptions. Just me, my equipment, and the relentless drive to become competent enough to matter.
Boxing combinations flowed like water. Jab, cross, hook, uppercut—thousands of repetitions burned into permanent muscle memory. My developing body kept pace with the learning, adapting impossibly fast.
I moved on to improvised weapons. Baseball bat, just like Steve would eventually make famous. But also crowbars. Lengths of pipe. Broken chair legs. Anything that could be grabbed in an emergency became an extension of my body.
Fight Master didn't discriminate. Every weapon mastered, every technique absorbed. Within two weeks, I could pick up any blunt object and use it with deadly efficiency.
The wooden practice knife became a real one—carefully purchased from a military surplus store, hidden from casual view. I practiced draws and strikes until they were instinctive. Practiced disarms until I could take a weapon from an opponent in under two seconds.
I was fifteen years old and probably more dangerous than most adults.
The thought should have scared me. Instead, it felt necessary.
Robin noticed.
"What happened to your hands?" She grabbed my right hand during movie night, studying the bruised knuckles and split skin.
"Basketball training got intense," I said automatically.
"Bull. I've seen basketball injuries. Those are boxer's hands." Her eyes narrowed. "What are you really doing in that big empty house, Harrington?"
I pulled my hand back gently. "Training. Just... training."
"For what?"
For monsters. For the end of the world. For keeping you and everyone else alive when reality tears open and nightmares spill out.
"I don't know yet," I said instead. "But I need to be ready."
Robin stared at me for a long moment. Then she sighed, grabbed the remote, and unpaused The Evil Dead.
"You're weird," she said.
"Yeah."
"If you need help—with whatever you're preparing for—you can ask."
My chest tightened. "Thanks."
We watched Ash fight deadites in a cabin, and I wondered how I'd explain to Robin someday that the monsters she thought were fiction would prove terrifyingly real.
But that was future Steve's problem. Present Steve just needed to keep training, keep preparing, keep building the foundation for everything that would come.
By the end of June, my body had transformed.
I caught my reflection in the basement mirror and barely recognized myself. The skinny fourteen-year-old was gone, replaced by someone with visible muscle definition and a fighter's stance. My hands were calloused and scarred. My eyes looked older.
Fight Master Phase 1 was sixty percent complete. I'd mastered multiple weapon types at a level that should have taken years. My body had adapted to support those skills—stronger, faster, more durable than baseline human.
And I still had 974 days until Will Byers vanished.
If I maintained this pace...
Don't think about it. Just train.
I photographed the supply cache locations one final time, ensuring I had backup documentation. Encrypted the coordinates in my journal using a cipher only I could decode. Tested my extraction speed with the practice knife—under one second now, smooth and automatic.
Robin came over one evening in early July, found me doing pull-ups on the exposed beams in the basement.
"Okay, seriously, what the hell?" She gestured at my setup—heavy bag, training dummies, weights I'd scavenged from the garage. "This isn't basketball training. This is... I don't even know what this is."
I dropped from the beam, grabbed a towel. "Can't explain yet."
"Try me."
"Something's coming," I said carefully. "I don't know exactly what or when, but I need to be ready. And I need people I trust to be ready too."
Robin crossed her arms. "That's incredibly ominous."
"I know."
"Are you in some kind of trouble? Because if Tommy and his friends are threatening you—"
"It's not them." I met her eyes. "I promise, when I can explain, I will. Until then, just... trust that I'm not going crazy. I'm preparing for something real."
"Something real that requires you to learn knife fighting?"
"Yeah."
Robin studied me, then shook her head. "You're lucky I like you, Harrington. Because this is objectively concerning behavior."
"I know." I grabbed the towel and headed for the stairs. "Movie?"
"Horror?"
"Always."
We watched Alien for the third time, and I pretended I didn't see Robin watching me instead of the screen, trying to figure out what I was hiding.
The truth would come eventually. But not yet. Not until I had more pieces in place, more preparations complete, more time to build the alliances that would matter when Hawkins started falling apart.
For now, I just needed to keep moving forward.
Train. Prepare. Survive.
974 days.
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