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.”
The dragging was an awful, bumpy effort scored by fleshy squishes and birdlike chirps, with Doug on point, his back sickled, using the jump rope’s knot to yank their cargo over roots, rocks, and weeds, obstacles ignorable on foot but oppressive when towing. A dozen times Liv could have helped, but she was holding the flashlight, wasn’t she? And the knife, too? Doug, in the greatest mercy he’d ever shown, did not once ask her to grab the feet. Were they even feet? Would they kick if she touched them? She kept the light on Doug’s back so she didn’t have to know.
Liv wasn’t sure where they were headed until Doug’s shoulder rammed against the shed door. It wasn’t locked; this was Custer Road. Doug freed one of his dragging hands to grope for the knob and wrench it. Time and moisture had done damage. The swollen door stuck, but Doug slugged his shoulder against it until it burst inward. Doug tripped inside, still gripping the tarp-thing, and Liv followed, a veil of cobweb settling over her face. She heard Doug pull a light string and nothing happened; he pulled another and nothing. Only in contrast to these delicate clicks did Liv notice John barking, an old dog but still possessing dog instincts, and she was so glad he was kept indoors at night, so glad he feared the backyard.
The last light bulb worked. The first item Liv saw was the light string itself, captured in balletic rebound. That same second, Doug rolled the thing across the floor, upsetting years of dust. The tarp half unwrapped, and the thing thumped into the far wall. Items hanging on the wall shook and swayed enough to remind Liv that this wasn’t a shed, this was the Armory, and her father’s weapons remained snug inside their chalk-outlined slots—Maquahuitl, Mist, every one but Lizardpoint, which had disappeared along with Lee.
Doug sprang up, backpedaling into Liv and gasping as if he’d done the whole operation—release the trap, lay the tarp, knot the rope, drag it home—on a single lungful of breath.
The bulb’s rocking slowed, focusing its yellow parabola on the thing below it, collapsed amid the blue tarp and tangled in jump rope. The thing wore no clothing. What Liv could see of its skin looked like thin, pliable plastic, absent of pores or hair. Where the flesh was lax, it was an opaque white, like milk halved with tap water. Where the flesh was stretched tight, it was translucent. When the being writhed, she could see interior organs of shocking color—pink, green, yellow—strain against the abdomen.
“What do we do?” she hissed.
Doug seemed caught in a trance.
“Doug! Come on! It’s moving!”
But he ducked to get a better look, and Liv, heart ramming, followed suit.
The alien was roughly five feet tall and humanoid. You could wrap a hand around its tiny tube of a neck, which somehow supported a spherical head almost reptilian in its lack of a forehead. Two eyes as large as baseballs protruded from shallow sockets and jerked in independent directions. The irises were of such crystalline blue that Liv had to force herself to look at the tiny nostril notches and mouse-hole ears. The being continued to chirp, though its mouth was no beak. It was a lathered, gnashing turmoil of wet palate and too much bone—the teeth were jumbled, askew, jutting at odd angles. What this mess of teeth might be able to chew was impossible to say.
“Let’s go,” Liv pleaded.
“It’s not getting up,” Doug whispered. “It’s hurt.”
How else, Liv had to admit, could you interpret the thing’s writhing? Its chest, no wider than that of a child’s, beat up and down under a set of exoskeletal ribs. What looked like a heart—a throbbing brown bag—was tucked beneath the sternum, as vulnerable as an unpunctured egg yolk. Farther down, Liv saw purple lungs inflate and deflate in fright. The ribs weren’t the only exposed bones; yellow knobs crested from the flesh at the elbows, knees, knuckles, and shoulders. From the scapulas dangled two scrawny arms, the armpits webbed with veined membranes. The arms ended in thick, three-fingered hands, the left of which was squeezed shut, tight as a rock.
“There’s zip ties,” Doug said. “On the bench. Right beside it.”
“Doug, no.”
“What else are we going to do? It could crawl right after us.”
Doug licked his lips, emboldened himself with urgent mutters, then crept forward. The alien’s huge eyes twitched. Its heart flexed harder. Doug darted and snatched a handful of black plastic ties. The thing chirped and drew back against the wall, but its cycling legs couldn’t find purchase in the tangle of tarp. Its kicking freed the lower half of its body; soft-looking cysts, maybe tumors, covered it from waist to knee.
When had Doug Monk become the bravest person in the world? With a strangled cry, he reached down and grabbed the alien’s right arm. Liv gasped, wondering if Doug’s skin would begin to boil, expecting long claws to switchblade from the thing’s three fingers. Before anything so frightful could happen, Doug snugged a zip tie to its wrist, shoved it against the wall’s crossbar, and locked it tight. The alien’s rubbery neck twisted to see and its body torqued that way, too, and Liv got a glimpse of the bony, six-inch tail that extended from its spine.
The alien’s pitch sharpened—Louk! Louk! Louk! Doug hopped on its body, took hold of the opposite arm, and zip-tied it to the same crossbar before scrambling out of range. The thing’s yowls cut off, and its round head rolled left and right as its eyes skipped from point to point. It gave both arms an experimental shake. Its armpit membranes pulled taut.
“That’s a skinner,” Doug panted.
Liv fought to place the word. This all meant something, didn’t it? Beyond the immediate horror and danger? This was a vindication. Proof of knowledge. Refutation of insanity. Doug and Liv had heard more than anyone else alive about Lee Fleming’s skinners, the Green Man, the Floating Pumpkin. All things, she supposed, were uglier when removed from a high-school-musical set and exposed in their natural state.