Page 55 of Bent Heavens

“Vulnerable little doe like you. How old are you anyway? You were my daughter, I’d ground you till you were seventy, walking into a dark apartment like this. On the other hand, what do I know? Never had any kids. I’m sterile as a stick.”

“I’m … sorry?”

“So what’s the story, then? You a Mr. Brown fanatic, or you got some other game? Forget that—if you really caught one in a trap, why didn’t you tell the police? Why haven’t you taken twenty million photos and spread them all over the Net?”

It was a question so sensible that even a man of debatable sense knew to ask it. Liv looked from Carbajal’s suspicious right eye into her lap. She’d never said it out loud. Saying it out loud was the end, she’d always known it, but it was also, in ways that mattered, the beginning.

“We…” Her neck ached from how it hung. “We hurt it.”

“Define hurt.”

“We beat it.” Each word a hook into her flesh. “We … tortured it.”

“Because you were scared?”

Liv nodded, but it only agitated the lie into a more toxic form. “No. That’s not true. We were mad. We wanted to hurt it.”

Carbajal tapped mints into his mouth. He sucked, his jaw circling.

“Now why,” he said in a voice nearly pleasant, “would you want to do that?”

“Because.” The word cracked, as loud and wet as Carbajal’s cough. “It took my dad, and we had to do something, didn’t we?” Absolution, that’s all she wanted, one adult to say that what she’d done was forgivable. “The alien took my dad, and we had to punish it.”

Carbajal almost deigned to look at her, rotating his head an inch from its stubborn profile view. He did it because he was startled—Liv could see it in the fall of his brow, the slackening of his frowning lips. She believed she had broken through; she watched for the apologetic drop of his shoulders.

Instead, he tipped his head so far back that Liv thought it might tumble off his shoulders. He laughed. Not another scornful chuckle but a booming, full-throated howl that shot to the ceiling and exploded around the room. Tic Tacs fired from his mouth, hard white projectiles. Spit, too, slopped down the front of his bathrobe. He pounded his fist against the table; his old chair squealed. He laughed harder and harder, and when the laughs were joined by coughs, it all got mixed up—gleeful sickness, painful glee, there was no telling.

Slowly Carbajal gained control. He leaned over the table, his back hitching with the last, mocking spates of laughter.

“I’m sorry,” he wheezed. “But, little girl? That thing you caught isn’t an ‘alien.’ Aliens don’t exist. That thing you and your friend have been torturing is a man.”

28.

Liv felt neither the chair at her back nor the floor at her feet. Stupor slopped over her like thick paste, slowing the race of questions. Several managed to crawl across her brain like wounded animals, but only one made it all the way: Had what she and Doug done been worse than she’d even imagined?

“Long as you’re sitting down with your mouth shut,” Carbajal said, “let me tell you a story. It’s a story I tried to file four years ago before some very persuasive people made sure no one printed a word. Some shithole Iowa newspaper, you think they’ve got the stones to fight that kind of pressure? Fuck no, not when there’s high school football to write about. You’d know this story already if you read the forums.”

Liv inched her fingertips across the tabletop. Chipped, scratched, but real. This was all real, every bit of it was happening.

“They teach you about Anatoli Bugorski in school? Of course they don’t. Our kiddies shouldn’t dream about anything but sugarplum fairies. Anatoli Bugorski was a Russian researcher who got an accidental proton beam to the noggin in 1978. Five hundred rads is enough to kill you dead, and this guy took three hundred thousand. Dead meat, right? Except the guy doesn’t die. His face puffs up and he has the odd seizure, but he’s alive. He’s still alive today. Now there’s no more Soviet Union. The gulags are empty. The guy is talking. He says there’s others like him, a whole platoon of proton warriors. ‘I am being tested,’ he said. ‘The human capacity for survival is being tested.’”

“This is…” Liv heard her own voice as if through a wall. “Some kind of test?”

“You didn’t find your way to shithole number 302 without putting in some miles on the World Wide Web. You ever come across something called the Biatalik Program?”

If anyone had followed the wild forum postings of Mr. Brown, it would have been Doug. Yet this particular detail, this single one, was Liv’s to claim. It was Carbajal’s pronunciation, she thought, that subtle trace of a Spanish accent, the strokelike slowness of his speech, that made her recognize it, and instantly. She had heard of the Biatalik Program, though she hadn’t known it at the time. It was her second crucial misunderstanding; Liv began to wonder if her brain, in self-preservation, had fought all truths from the beginning.

Biatalik Program, Bee-ah-tall-lick Pro-gram. Or was it, misheard under radio tunes and party chatter, Be the tallest you can?

Major Dawkins had spoken these words in confidence to Lee Fleming at the major’s last birthday cookout. The memory was vivid, as are all memories of crying parents: her father’s face against the major’s Hawaiian shirt, his skinny back convulsing, while Liv, hunting for a reason to hope, had instilled the major’s gibberish phrase with false inspiration. The instinct of a little girl, she thought, the very thing Carbajal kept calling her.

“Major Dawkins,” she whispered.

“Good girl,” Carbajal said. “He was part of it. Think nuclear missile silos. Where does the government hide those? Bumfuck, North Dakota. Nowheresville, Missouri. Motherfucking Iowa. Places where no one’s looking. Biatalik Program, same deal. They needed an isolated place where they could explore the human form. Bugorski times a hundred. Chernobyl in a test tube. Don’t think America’s any better. Anytime the good old US of A tests a bomb, we chain up a few hundred beagles in the blast zone with Geiger counters clipped to their ears. Check the forums, girl. But animals only get you so far. You said your dad saw one, too?”

“And he disappeared,” she whispered.

“Biatalik was what they call ‘born classified,’ TS/SCI—top secret/sensitive compartmented information. Stuff even the Oval Office doesn’t need to know. Done without a dust mote of ethical oversight. One of the test subjects must have gotten out. Your dad saw him, and it put messed-up ideas in his head about UFOs, that’d be my guess. There would have been people plenty unhappy about what he saw. Your dad was a reporter?”