Page 50 of Bent Heavens

Weapons fractured upon impact. Wooden spears fired off their stone spearheads, flint arrowheads exploded into shrapnel. Liv hit the floor on instinct, covering her head, feeling nothing strike her but hearing a whole battlefield clatter across the concrete. She saw a gray blur—John scurrying aside—and taking the cue, she pistoned her legs away from the noise. Her spine hit a wall and she looked up, expecting to see Doug’s face a purple mask, Maquahuitl’s whole weight coming at her.

Instead, he was cradling the club like it was a broken arm.

“You ever think of me, Liv? Of me? At least if those kids were out there talking about what they saw here, it’d be something real, right? Something for me? It’s like all that stuff we used to do as kids. Visiting that monster made of animal parts. Trying to get into the grave robber’s apartment. Going to see the meteor in the fire station. I could be one of those things, Liv! Maybe it sounds like shit to you, because you’ll have college and jobs and husbands and kids. But that’s my future. That’s all I’ve got. People would come to see me. And not for fireworks. I could be proud.”

“You’re better than that,” she said, but it was a rasp.

“Stop lying to me,” he said. “If I lose A … I’ve got nothing left, Liv. Nothing.”

Doug Monk had never looked so lonely. The only sounds in the shed were the factory chugs of their inhales and exhales, John’s desolate whimper, and the skeleton rustle of the first crop of dead leaves mincing across the yard.

Concrete rumbled. It was Doug, dragging Maquahuitl along the floor, toward the door. Liv pushed herself to a sitting position. She watched Doug pass John, who sat with neck lowered, ears flattened, and eyes rolled up to Doug, his buddy since puppyhood. Pet him, Liv prayed. One pat on John’s head and she would believe that Doug might still be okay. Instead, she had a horrific vision that seemed every bit as plausible. Doug’s arm shooting out. Maquahuitl descending in an overhead crescent with the force of a dropped anvil. The stone blades passing through John so swiftly that his head took its time to fall from his body.

Doug did neither. He plodded through the destroyed shed, shoes sploshing through rain that twenty-some kids had tracked in. He paused at the threshold and looked about, as if considering trying to find A before being demoralized by the thickness of trees and shades of night. Just outside the door, Liv’s brutal vision came to life. Doug lifted Maquahuitl over his head and, with three shattering, shuddering blows, smashed the knob, the padlock, and all the connecting wood. Nothing would be kept safe inside the Armory ever again.

24.

For the next half hour, Liv became acquainted with the pulsing torture of paranoia. If this is how her father felt following his escape from abduction, no wonder he’d created the Armory, no wonder he’d built the traps. Liv stayed crouched in the shed long after she heard Doug drive off, her head tilted toward Custer Road for the gravel snap of his return. The rain dwindled, and she began to trust her hearing.

She couldn’t wait all night. A was out there where she’d left it, naked, coated with rain, and it was unseasonably cold. She pulled herself to a standing position, scooted John out the door, and gathered the blue tarp. Before she exited, she stepped over to the far wall and removed Mist—her old ally, the double-bladed antelope horns—from its hook. She felt better having it in her hand, hidden beneath the tarp.

There was no big secret to where she’d stashed A. Thirty feet off the path toward Amputator, she’d tucked the alien under a wild hedge. Carrying A had been no more difficult than a schoolbag. It’d been shivering then; now, ninety minutes later, it wasn’t shivering at all and dread flowed up Liv’s throat. She passed her hands over A’s body. It was shockingly cold. It was too dark to see much, so she wrapped A in the tarp, both for warmth and so that no one could see it—her mother, for instance, roused from a boozy bed—and lifted it once more.

Liv charged straight through the backyard, right through the swing-set tangle, straight up the back steps, where John waited. Before she could maneuver her hand from under the tarp, she paused to marvel at the soft, peach-hued kitchen light spilling from the back-door window. Never had she seen A under anything but the harshest of lights. A looked smaller, sadder.

Mist made opening the door difficult. Abruptly, then, Liv was indoors, a landscape as foreign to A as the alien ship would have been to Lee. Liv found herself experiencing it as a skinner might. The baffling variety of stovetop, table lamp, and laptop-charger lights. The druid drone of the refrigerator. The blunt odor of air freshener. The taste of still air, like paint. Liv lived here, this was her home, but it was only through muscle memory that she was able to carry A down the hall, past the closed door behind which her mom snored, and into her own bedroom. John followed and settled on the floor, looking worried.

The bedsprings didn’t react to A’s weight. Liv dropped Mist and gingerly began to unwrap the tarp. A’s flesh emerged, stripe by pallid stripe. The skinner had never looked as freakish as it did here, beneath the Midwestern tableau of pennants and posters. Liv had the bewildering sensation that she was seeing herself on the bed, and this was simply what she’d always looked like just under the surface.

Using a sweatshirt, she dried A off. It was freezing cold, still. She grabbed the far end of the blanket and folded it over A, then folded over the other end as well. A moved then, at last, a series of epileptic convulsions, and Liv panicked, folding up the sheet, then the mattress cover, as much material as possible, snugging it around the alien and tucking it tight. It wasn’t enough; the tremors continued. A was going to shiver itself to death, right here in her bed, if she didn’t do something.

So instead of setting up her computer and finally getting down to the business of Carbajal, she crawled into the bed. She didn’t know what made her do it. Stories she’d read, maybe, of stranded mountain climbers surviving with body heat. Liv parted the layers of blankets and slid beside A, pressing close. It was nothing like it had been with Bruno in the costume room, where each part of her had found a natural opposite. Nothing fit. A’s round head rolled off her cheek like a ball she couldn’t balance. Its shoulder bone jabbed her sternum. Its backward-bent legs pressed painfully against her shins.

None of it mattered. She curled her arms around A’s cool, fragile body and held tight. It shivered. Was it because of bodily chill or her aberrant human touch? She placed her lips against its earholes and shushed like she used to shush John when he was agitated by thunder, except in these shushes she hid words: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. She stroked A, too, hoping to generate warmth, her fingertips still surprised by the terrain of webbed membranes, bony extrusions, and shriveled tumors. She closed her eyes and told herself that this was Bruno. Or her mother, or her father, anyone at all overdue for embrace.

Soon she didn’t know the difference between A’s extremities and her own. The skinner’s heart recovered a stable tempo, and Liv’s breathing, in response, leveled off. From under her own ribs radiated an unexpected feeling. It wasn’t happiness—there was too much to fear—but it was, she thought, a type of contentment, maybe brought on by exhaustion, maybe not. The police could wait until morning. Right now, A needed warmth and sleep before suffering renewed trials.

Liv closed her eyes, cupped A’s head, and tucked it beneath her chin. There, it fit after all. Tomorrow, she told herself. Her confession to police, the fallout, the taking away of A—all sorts of hell could be confronted tomorrow. Tonight she was tired. It seemed as if her bed was a box of fine sand, and she sank into it until she was covered. She fell asleep and had a dream that felt very real: A’s thick, three-fingered hands moving clumsily across her body as it tried to pull bits of bedsheet over the scrapes she’d suffered in the shed, bandaging Liv as she, for so long, had bandaged it.

25.

Sunday. It had to be Sunday. Liv would tell herself later that, given her slumberous fog, she could be forgiven for mistaking the day as one from the past two years: the knocking sounds (Doug rapping at the window), rustling sounds (Doug collecting John’s feces in a bag), and thumping sounds (Doug raiding the kitchen for Pop-Tarts). Liv threw an arm over her eyes, prepared her usual reply of Can’t you be late for once?

What was different now was that Doug was inside her room. He was touching her. She must have slept too deeply, and he’d decided to jostle her awake. She swatted at him, then a complete recollection of A landed all at once. The precise space the skinner took on the mattress, its weight in her arms, the reedy sound of its breathing. She knew all of this despite A’s absence. She heard Doug’s grunt of effort, too quiet to be trusted.

The show. The crowd. The rage. It was Saturday, not Sunday. She squinted. Doug was stepping away from the bed. What was happening? He balanced A upright while he wound the tarp around it. He lifted its wrapped body into both arms, and it seemed by accident that he caught Liv’s eye as he turned to leave.

She blinked up at him, confused, dimly alarmed, and feeling a great ache in her empty arms. Doug, in reply, did the least expected thing. He didn’t snarl in disgust of how she’d slept alongside it. He didn’t whip Maquahuitl from behind his back. What he did was smile, a smile as gentle as the hands he’d used to remove A.

“A’s light.” He chuckled softly. “Light as a ghost.”

Liv wiped a clump of tangled hair from what felt like a puffy face. She hoisted herself to an elbow. She looked around. The September dawn produced a paltry, sea-green silt that made her room look as if it had been transplanted to the woods out back. Her survey ended on the murky, conjoined form of Doug and A. She’d hoped a night of meditation would calm Doug, and it seemed to have done that.

She scanned the floor and found Mist swaddled in a sweater. The weapon was too far to reach—and what would she do with it if she had it? Perhaps it was some enzyme that had seeped from A’s flesh, but she was so, so, so tired. Last night, all she’d wanted was to turn over A to the authorities. This morning, though, she felt in her exhaustion a relinquishing of those ideals, all so burdensome.

“You said it wasn’t justice,” she whispered. “To…”

“To kill it,” he finished.