Liv’s fingers were all over the place, drained of dexterity as if they’d been severed. Three apps, clownlike in their jolly, trivial purposes, popped open before her sweaty digits managed to hit the Contacts app. It leaped to her Recents, but Doug wasn’t there—damn her for letting Doug slide off the edge of her world. Her finger hit Favorites, but Doug wasn’t there, either. Had she deleted him from the list? Doug, who’d answered his phone every time in life it had mattered? She scrolled and found his name, those comforting four letters.
Of course he answered right away.
Of course he knew something was wrong.
“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.”
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.
“It’s not blue,” she managed. “Dad said they were blue.”
“It’s kind of blue.”
“It’s clear.”
“Maybe the lights on the ship were blue.”
“And they’re supposed to be wrinkly. It’s smooth.”
“Because it shed its skin. He said that’s what they do.”
“He said they don’t have mouths.”
“That doesn’t look like any mouth I’ve ever seen.”
“Dad said they don’t have mouths.”
Doug glared, the first time he’d taken his eyes off the alien. “There was the Green Man, right? The Green Man didn’t look anything like the skinners. Maybe there’s different kinds? How am I supposed to know?”
“There was one called the Whistler.”
“Yeah. Right. And it made a sound.”
“This one makes sounds.”
Even amid terror, she recognized the childish idiocy of her comment. She needed to wake the hell up. She shook her head. Still she felt muddy. She slapped her cheek. She bit her tongue. An extraterrestrial being was in her garden shed. No, it was simpler, broader than that. An extraterrestrial being existed. She was looking at something few people had ever seen, and if she didn’t grow up and act like an adult, it might get away, and then she’d be just like her father—a madman raving about something no one else would believe.
She rooted her phone from her pocket. She brought up the keypad. She looked at Doug for support, but he was staring at the alien again. Fine, it didn’t matter. She tapped in 9, then 1, then, because of her trembling figures, a 4, and had to kill the call, then tapped 9, but accidentally twice, and killed the call again, and then with ridiculous slowness tapped 9, then 1, and was poised to press the final 1, picturing the cavalry quickness of the ambulance that had bounded onto the town square the day her dad had lost his mind—or so everyone had believed.
But she didn’t press the final digit, and that millimeter distance between fingertip and touchscreen would haunt the rest of her life. Doug was saying something, a single word, louder and louder until it broke through her absorption, and it took her looking up from her phone to make sense of it.
“Scalp,” he was saying. “Scalp.”
What a peculiar word, Liv thought.
Doug stood at the alien’s side. He looked sick.
“Like a scalp,” he whimpered.
She felt nothing when she stepped alongside Doug. She felt nothing when her phone slipped from her hand. She thought it probable she would feel nothing ever again. As reluctantly as a funeral-parlor guest might turn her eyes to a loved one’s casket, she followed Doug’s pointed finger to the alien’s left hand, which, until then, had been squeezed into a fist. The three thick fingers were splayed now, perhaps because it had no strength left to hide what it carried.
What it held in its palm was not a scalp in the literal sense, but Doug was right. It was a souvenir of conquest stripped off a past victim. The two of them stood shoulder to sweaty shoulder, in silence but for the alien’s wheezing, their ears tuned to the woods, for now it seemed quite possible they might hear the bangs, snaps, and crashes of five other traps being triggered, as there was no mistaking the trophy the skinner held.
It was her father’s wrist compass.