From a Buick 8(58)

Nothing explained it, in Sandy's opinion.

Curt opened the bag completely and reached inside. Sandy felt his stomach knot into a sick ball and wondered if he could have forced himself to do what Curt was doing. He didn't think so. Trooper Wilcox never hesitated, however. When his gloved fingers touched the corpse in the bag, Tony recoiled a little. His feet stayed put but his upper body swayed backward, as if to avoid a punch. And he made an involuntary sound of disgust behind his cute pink mask.

'You okay?' Curt asked.

'Yes,' Tony said.

'Good. I'll mount it. You pin it.'

'Okay.'

'Are you sure you're all right?'

'Yes, goddammit.'

'Because I feel queasy, too.' Sandy could see sweat running down the side of Curt's face, dampening the elastic that held his mask.

'Let's save the sensitivity-training session for later and just get it done, what do you say?'

Curt lifted the bat-thing to the corkboard. Sandy could hear an odd and rather terrible sound as he did so. It might have been only the combination of overstrained ears and the quiet rustle of clothes and gloves, but Sandy didn't actually believe that. It was dead skin rubbing against dead skin, creating a sound that was somehow like words spoken very low in an alien tongue. It made Sandy want to cover his ears.

At the same time he became aware of that tenebrous rustling, his eyes seemed to sharpen. The world took on a preternatural clarity. He could see the rosy pink of Curtis's skin through the thin gloves he was wearing, and the matted whorls that was the hair on the backs of his fingers. The glove's white was very bright against the creature's midsection, which had gone a matted, listless gray. The thing's mouth hung open. Its single black eye stared at nothing, its surface dull and glazed. To Sandy that eye looked as big as a teacup.

The smell was getting worse, but Sandy said nothing. Curt and the Sergeant were right in there with it, next to the source. He guessed if they could stand it, he could.

Curt peeled up the wing lying across the creature's middle, revealing sallow green fur and a small puckered cavity that might have held the thing's genitals. He held the wing against the corkboard. 'Pin,' he said.

Tony pinned the wing. It was dark gray and all membrane. There was no sign of bone or blood vessels that Sandy could see. Curt shifted his hand on the thing's midsection so he could raise the other wing. Sandy heard that liquid squelching sound again. It was getting hot in the supply room and had to be even worse in the closet. Those Tensor lamps.

'Pin, boss.'

Tony pinned the other wing and now the creature hung on the board like something out of a Bela Lugosi film. Except, once you could see all of it, it didn't really look much like a bat at all, or a flying squirrel, or certainly any kind of bird.

It didn't look like anything. That yellow prong sticking out from the center of its face, for instance ? was it a bone? A beak? A nose? If it was a nose, where were the nostrils? To Sandy it looked more like a claw than a nose, and more like a thorn than a claw. And what about that single eye? Sandy tried to think of any earthly creature that had only one eye and couldn't. There had to be such a creature, didn't there? Somewhere? In the jungles of South America, or maybe at the bottom of the ocean?

And the thing had no feet; its body simply ended in a butt like a green-black thumb. Curt pinned this part of the specimen's anatomy to the board himself, pinching the furry hide away from its body and then impaling a loose fold. Tony finished the job by driving pins into the corkboard through the thing's armpits. Or maybe you call them wingpits, Sandy thought. This time it was Curtis who made an involuntary sound of disgust behind his mask, and he wiped his brow with his forearm. 'I wish we'd thought to bring in the fan,' he said. Sandy, whose head was beginning to swim, agreed. Either the stench was getting worse or it had a cumulative effect.

'Plug in one more thing and we'd probably trip the breaker,' Tony said. 'Then we could be in the dark with this ugly motherf*cker. Also trapped, on account of Cecil B. DeMille's got his camera set up in the doorway. Go on, Curt. I'm okay if you are.'

Curt stepped back, snatched a breath of slightly cleaner air, tried to compose himself, then stepped forward to the table again. 'I'm not measuring,' he said. 'We got all that done out in the shed, right?'

'Yeah,' Sandy replied. 'Fourteen inches long. Thirty-six centimeters, if you like that better. Body's about a handspan across at the widest. Maybe a little less. Go on, for God's sake, so we can get out of here.'

'Give me both scalpels, plus retractors.'

'How many retractors?'

Curt gave him a look that said Don't be a bozo. 'All of them.' Another quick swipe of the forehead. And, after Sandy had handed the stuff over the top of the camera and Curt had arranged it as best he could: 'Watch through the viewfinder, okay? Zoom the shit out of the mother. Let's get the best record we can.'

'People'd still say it's a fake,' Tony said mildly. 'You know that, don't you?'

Curtis then said something Sandy never forgot. He believed that Curtis, already under severe mental strain and in increasingly severe physical distress, spoke the truth of his mind in baldly simple terms people rarely dare to use, because they reveal too much about the speaker's real heart. 'Fuck the John Q.'s,' was what Curtis said. 'This is for us.'