Page 20 of Bent Heavens

“Liv? You okay?”

“There’s—we—in the, in the—”

“Slow down, slow down. Is somebody hurt?”

“No—yes—there’s—the, in the trap—”

“Oh my god, I knew it.” Doug’s voice, right off, was hoarse with emotion. “Don’t move. Don’t move.”

She still expected a bicycle’s gravel skid, even though Doug had been driving a decade-old junker for a couple of years. Its skid was louder and throatier, coming ten minutes after the call. Liv sprinted the width of the house and unlocked the front door, and he came barreling inside, taking her by the arms, the kind of physical contact he would never initiate except that she’d clutched at him first, at his sleeves, which, of course, didn’t exist, her ragged, paint-chipped nails digging into his biceps.

“I don’t know what—it’s back there, Doug, in the—I saw it, in the trap, it’s—”

“Okay, shh, Liv, c’mon, shut up.”

She pointed toward the backyard, the dark impossibilities of a hidden world.

“Yeah?” Doug’s eyes shone like new pennies. “You sure?”

She nodded. He broke away. Doug still knew where everything was. He gathered the lantern flashlight from the laundry room, the softball bat from her bedroom closet, her old jump rope from the basement toy chest, a chef’s knife from the kitchen drawer. He took the flashlight and bat and gave her the rest.

“No,” she said. “We can’t, we can’t go—”

“Listen to me. We need to check this out. Make sure you’re right.”

“I don’t want to see it again, I don’t—”

“You’ll be fine. Stay right behind me. Okay? Stay directly behind me.”

The two cracks of the door’s lock and knob were like double-barrel shots. Liv cowered, and when she recovered, she saw Doug leaping down the steps, his pale arms reflective in the night, the black lawn mowed by the flashlight’s beam. His bold charge gave Liv a surge of confidence. She ran after him into a night the temperature and texture of sweaty skin, the dream objects of knife and rope transforming into actual physical objects in her hands.

Doug ripped a blue tarp from a rotten pile of wood, wadded it, jammed it under an armpit.

In the woods the flashlight was a chisel chipping through old black paint. Doug would scramble down a slope, and Liv would feel a hundred miles away, only to scramble down the same slope and crash into Doug, her brandished knife zinging against his metal bat. The night kept tensing, flexing, feinting. She felt pummeled, though nothing more lethal than a twig touched her.

The instant the flashlight beam struck metal, they both pulled back, but it was too late. All the expected colors and textures—brown, gray, green, rough, stony, leafed—were disrupted by a thing that was shockingly white and of slippery smoothness, a thing that, worst of all, squirmed. Liv took the knife with both hands. Doug fumbled the other tools, the bat clattering against the flashlight so that the light spun, and the whole forest appeared to tumble down eternity’s hill.

“Stay behind,” Doug gasped, and she did, placing her knifed fist against his spine and taking to the balls of her feet, knees bent, just like all her coaches taught her. She couldn’t see anything beyond the outline of Doug’s long, messy hair. She felt him shuffle a few steps closer, and she closed the gap so that her fist remained at his back. It was all that kept her from falling through a chasm into hell.

The light steadied. Doug hissed.

“Jesus. Jesus.”

“Is it?” Liv begged. “Is it?”

“Rope.”

She had to think about what the word meant, which hand held it, how that hand worked. He pulled the jump rope through her fist, burning her palm.

“Stay,” he whispered.

Was he talking to her? Or it? Doug inched away, and Liv forced herself to remain still, the last human left in the black of outer space. The flashlight had been placed upon the ground, turning blades of grass into seven-foot shadow-spikes. There was rustling, first Doug’s knees into leaves, second the snake rattle of the tarp being flapped out to full size. An absence of sound lasted forever, until forever broke and Amputator’s jaws creaked. Doug was doing the dirty work, the same as he ever did, prying open the trap by hand—hazardous in daylight, treacherous at night—which meant he was right next to the thing, maybe touching it, and when she heard the clack of the opened jaws, her one thought was that he’d set it free, and like any wounded thing, now it would fight.

But the next noise was the soft crunch of the thrown tarp. Liv saw it, lit from below for a second, a radiant blue parachute. Doug leaped on top of it to bring it down hard, and for the next fifty or sixty seconds Liv was paralyzed by razor-thin sights and truncated sounds. The flashlight only caught Doug’s feet, which dug into the dirt as he torqued his body, wrestling either the thing or the tarp itself. He exhaled in hard, isolated puffs and grunted with strain. Liv couldn’t hear anything else—definitely not the muffled sweck, wourk, clirp.

Liv flinched at a whip of rope. Doug was tying the tarp around the thing. The plastic ends of the jump rope clacked as they were knotted.

“I got it,” he wheezed. “Get the light, the light.”