Page 25 of Bent Heavens

She thrust the book into Doug’s arms. He tried to hand it back, but she shrugged it off. Doug was adamant; in future days, and weeks, and months, he’d keep trying to return it, telling her it was meant for her, assuring her that its poetry, just as Lee had always said, was full of secrets. She refused to talk about it, and as their relationship narrowed over the following two years to little beyond Sunday morning trap checking, Doug quit trying. Lee’s italics, whatever they were worth, belonged to Doug.

12.

Liv lifted the compass into the moonlight. The box her father had opened on his birthday had boasted scratch-resistance, but that claim had been disproven. A slash ran across its face, northeast to southwest. She couldn’t blame the manufacturers, who hadn’t worked into their calculations the trials of an alien race. The plastic wristband was notched and discolored, but the latch still worked, and she cinched it around her left wrist. It was slimy against her skin, and she heard her father’s town-square shout: Biologic evidence!

She’d given Doug her father’s notated copy of Resurrection Update, but this gift was different. He had worn this. It was a part of him. The compass still worked, wobbling in oil as she sharked her arm through the pale light. It was a good distraction until the moonlight hit the glass wrong and refracted a blob of light onto Doug, who lay curled on her floor among dirty clothes. The slow rise of his back suggested he was asleep, a state that seemed inconceivable when they’d retreated to her bedroom hours earlier.

They’d come inside because of John. He hadn’t quit barking, and who knew if Aggie, when she got home, would react to the dog’s agitation by going into the backyard. They’d fed John a second dinner and led him to Liv’s bedroom, and once there, nobody wanted to go back to the Armory. Here was a room packed with comforting, understandable objects, and inside it they’d huddled until Aggie had come home, shuffled about the kitchen, clinked wine bottle and glass, and retired to bed. Liv and Doug took the cue to lie down and stare at the ceiling. It was the innocent sleepovers of their youth turned inside out.

Doug, though, was a master sleeper, and never had Liv envied the ability more. Her eyeballs throbbed. Her chest ached from the fist-bash of her heart. Her mind raced through competing image streams of her father hopping the electric fence and the skinner zip-tied inside the shed. She had no emotions. Or perhaps had all of them at once?

She sat up. That felt better. She put her feet on the floor. The floor held. Her phone was right there. She could still call 911. Instead she stood up. Doug didn’t move. John’s eyes didn’t open. She stepped over them to the door. Her muscles cried out in relief. She entered the hall, closed the door behind her. Her legs begged to run. She could. She still wore shoes. To sprint through the night, to drown in endorphins, what a release it would be. She unlocked and opened the back door. A billion excited bugs rubbed their wings.

Before leaving the shed, they’d piled lumber against the door. Lee Fleming had designed six intricate traps, but a pile of loose wood was the best his protégés could do. She undid the blockade, the wood sharp and real inside what otherwise felt like a dream. They’d also left on the lone light bulb, and already it was fading. What if it burned out and she was left in the dark with the thing? If there even was a thing. Maybe that’s what she’d walked out here to determine.

It did not take long to confirm. The thing was right where they’d left it. It slid into view with the same dull inevitability of the TV when she entered the living room. The skinner’s protuberant eyes scanned her, one rolling left while the other rolled upward. Its spindly neck shone from liquid that had oozed from its mouth. It didn’t bother to struggle; its wrists were inflamed from previous efforts. Liv just stared at it, inhaling its garbage odor, acclimating herself to the shed as she might a cold swimming lake.

Liv did what only Doug had so far dared: She came closer. Her father’s tables, weighed down by drills, table saws, and other metal corpses, offered slim clearance. If she stumbled, she’d fall right on top of the thing, an indescribable fate, and if she reached for the walls to catch herself, she’d bring down weapons that had waited two years to impale something. She tried to think like an aerialist, one foot in front of the other, until she stood above it.

“What did you do to my dad?” she whispered.

It blinked. Liv gasped; she hadn’t known it had eyelids. They were transparent films that passed as quick as a wash of water. Its irises were big as quarters and so blue Liv believed for a moment it was daytime, and they were reflecting cloudless skies. Liv hissed in self-reprimand. This merciless thing would hold no sway over her. She held up her wrist and showed the skinner something it recognized.

“You never should’ve brought this.” Hearing her own voice strengthened her.

The skinner’s left hand, the one that had gripped the compass, sprang open its three fingers. Its bone-knuckles rapped against the wall, and the middle finger grazed Liv’s hand. The finger was lukewarm and tacky, and Liv, senses heightened, took it as an attempt to reclaim the compass trophy. She leaned away even as she swiped with her right fist in defense. Her knuckle of flesh struck one of its knuckles of bone, and it hurt, and that hurt startled her, and on instinct, she kicked.

Her shoe struck the skinner where its waist was narrowest. The impact was revoltingly soft and punctured one of the gray tumors. The skinner made one of its chirps: Yolp! The sound was pitiful enough that she felt a quick, gasping release from her suffocating fear, and she clung desperately to that feeling to safeguard her sanity, to establish that she was stronger than this thing, and that she would be all right if only she kept it that way.

Her father’s voice floated back to her.

If anything ever happens to me, and you two have to deal with this on your own, you have everything you need. The traps, the weapons. You know what to do.

Did she know what to do? She didn’t think; she kicked again. Her shoe struck the thing’s knee. It mewled, and its legs, with beetle speed, scrabbled to maneuver its lower half out of range. Its feet pulled free of the tarp for the first time, and Liv saw that they were three-digited like its hands, the undersides hard and segmented like chickens’ feet. Its left ankle was in bad, bloody shape from where Amputator had bit it. The skin was ripped into triangular flaps, and an inch of leg bone was visible.

She grasped at this detail, too, greedily. Only at this moment did she realize the full weight of fear that had dominated the past three years: fear that her dad was crazy, that he was deathly ill, that one day a policeman would come knocking to tell her they’d identified a pile of human bones. At the instant of striking the skinner, all that fear exploded into red rage, a feeling so much better to feel.

You know what to do.

She stomped her heel at the wounded ankle. The skinner skittered back, curling itself to a half-fetal position, thereby presenting the bigger targets of thighs and shoulder blades, not to mention tail and head. Liv stepped closer, lungs hot and churning, head on fire. She circled the skinner, mustering every warm memory of her dad she could—and kicked. (Her dad bathing her as a child, making her bubble-bath beards.) And kicked. (Her dad driving her an hour back to Iowa City to find the stuffed animal she’d left.) And kicked. (Her dad, during tricky middle school years, knowing when to be quiet and watch Buffy with her.) She kicked for her dad, her mom, but mostly herself, so that, for once, she would be the one delivering all the fear. She reeled back for more, reeled back, reeled back.

A hand took her shoulder. Funny for a girl wearing a compass, she’d lost all sense of direction and spun to attack. But it was Doug, sleepy-haired but not sleepy-eyed, holding up the white flag of his other hand. She cannoned her held breath, billowing hair from her face that resettled in a sweaty net. She focused on Doug’s face. He looked so calm, so solid. Her knees shook. She looked at the skinner’s pinkening bruises and spasming muscles and felt shame, perhaps for what she’d done, perhaps because she’d slunk from Doug to do it in secret.

“I’m tired; I’m screwed up,” she mumbled. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

She tried to move past him, but he sidestepped into her path and their shoulders collided. They were of equal height, but his shoulder, due to dumbbell drills, was bigger, and never had it been more apparent. Liv couldn’t go backward without stepping on the skinner, and thought she’d never stood so close to Doug for so long. She could smell the dried sweat of their earlier labor, the grease of his unwashed hair. The fading bulb turned his face into a tiger-stripe mystery of light and shadow. The swinging of his straggles of hair told her that he had begun to nod.

He pushed himself into her, chest against breasts, not aggressively, not sexually, just a request for passage. Liv swiveled her body like a gate so that he could stand next to her and stare straight down at the skinner. Doug was front-lit now, his bright eyes searching the alien’s body while the alien’s huge blue eyes did the same thing back.

Doug called for Liv with his fingers—which closed into a fist.

“You need to put your back into it,” he said.

He held up his fist so she could see it in the dim light. She lifted her hand, curled her fingers into a similar weapon. The tightening of skin across her knuckles felt good. Perhaps everything would feel good in a minute, for there was no more guilt in this shed, not when both of them were so eager to take back what they’d lost, not when both of them were so hungry to hit.

13.

Emerging from the Armory that first night was hard. The gray predawn slid across their skin like cold silt, gumming their eyes so they couldn’t see the blood on their hands and clothes, clotting their ears so they couldn’t hear the thing’s heaving on the opposite side of the door. Liv was reminded of every time she’d crept out back to listen for her father’s noises on the other side of the same door, just to make sure his illness hadn’t overtaken him and he was lying there dead.