Skinners Bleed. That’s what fifteen-year-old Liv repeated to herself, despite her disbelief, as she sprinted through the forest, the uneven ground seeming to rush at her instead of vice versa. Mist’s antelope-horn handle was so sweat-slick she had to use both hands, which meant no fending off the springy July branches that slapped and pine needles that poked, nor the morning sun that fired like buckshot through the leafy canopy, the whole world turned alien and enemy. Her dad was out of sight, but his shouts echoed—Doug, straight ahead! Liv, swing right!—instructions she couldn’t follow, not moving this quickly, not being this scared.
This was not some test run. They were chasing a skinner, a thing that did not exist, though that did not mean the chase itself, the speed, the very-real weapons, her father’s fever, the contagious madness, the danger of it all wasn’t real.
She held Mist in front of her like handlebars. In the breathless dread of the moment, she nearly believed that her father was, in fact, chasing a skinner, and if that was true, and the creature popped up in front of her, it was best to lead with something sharp, wasn’t it? Lee hadn’t only assured her and Doug that skinners bled, he’d even described that their blood, like ours, was red. At that, Doug had winked at Liv. If Lee knew the color of skinner blood, that meant he’d managed to make a few of the bastards bleed.
Liv heard a whistle and caught the blur of a projectile. Lizardpoint, her dad’s African fighting pick, had been tucked, as ever, under his belt, but he’d also come armed with a cowhide-gripped Inuit bow and matching quiver of rosewood arrows, and he’d just taken a shot at what he thought was the skinner. Liv had known the bow was futile. With all the weapon forging, trap setting, and hunt planning, there’d been little time for her dad to master the thing. He would be, at best, inaccurate, and, at worst, dangerous to Liv and Doug.
Danger, though, was a concept leeched of meaning. Playing defense at home with traps had begun to wear upon Lee. If he’d been ill before, now he was hanging by a thread. Days passed without sleep. His voice was raw from the acid of frequent vomiting. Sometimes he would faint, and when he fell, his bones clacked like wooden blocks. Despite all of this, he’d taken the offensive in May, heading up hunting expeditions of escalating ambition, one every week or so, first into the same woods inside which he’d seeded the traps, and then beyond, hopping from one grove of trees to another in a haphazard path across the countryside.
Liv stayed on the team for one reason. Someone had to keep an eye on Lee Fleming. Doug was too rabid an apprentice to make independent judgments. Aggie’s two jobs, meanwhile, had turned her into a rag doll—and a chunk of that income needed to go to wine, didn’t it? Letting a horribly ill, unstable husband take her daughter on unsafe, probably illegal treks might have suggested Aggie was an unfit parent, but Liv understood her mom’s perspective. Lee always returned from these hunts greatly improved, color returned to his cheeks, able to keep down several meals in a row.
Hope, a creature of tiny claws, hung in there.
Today, July 15, was the final hunt, the last day Liv would ever see her father, and though she didn’t know that, a sense of doom blanketed the day like a thick snowfall. Finally her dad’s birthday wrist compass had a purpose: Black Glade, only a half-hour drive from home, was Iowa’s largest forest, a thorned and brambled repository for every cautionary tale told by adults and campfire shocker told by teens, and Lee’s confusing, illogical tracking of the skinners had led them to it. The woods were worse than Liv imagined—still morning and already she felt lost inside sickening growth and pregnant death.
Lee had instructed them, through gruesome coughs, to keep one eye on the forest floor for skinners’ shed skin, and fruitless though it was, Liv did it, which is why she didn’t get a good look at the creature that dashed from beneath a bush to her left. She cried out, swinging Mist in its general direction. Leaves shivered and branches bounced as the animal raced through the underbrush. It was a rabbit or squirrel, she knew that, but her dad didn’t, and he hollered back.
“Guard the perimeter, Liv! Flush it to me!”
She started running—and something hit her. It felt like a whip across her midsection, and a second across her thighs, and she was stopped as surely as if she’d hit a wall, her momentum blasting the air from her lungs and ripping Mist from her hands. Next she felt jabs of pain, three or four. She’d been shot, she was sure of it, her father having mistaken her for a skinner. How, then, was she still standing? She forced herself to look down, expecting an arrow. There, in the overgrown brush, lay the remains of a barbed-wire fence. She’d charged right into it.
She leaned back and felt two barbs dislodge from her belly. The punctures weren’t deep, but her shirt was spotted with blood, and she felt stirrings of panic. She tried to withdraw from the fence, but her right leg resisted. It had managed to punch between two wires, tearing them from rotted posts, and now her leg was snarled in rusted barbs so similar to one of Lee’s traps that, for a minute, she was certain the skinner was her.
“Quit wiggling.”
Doug emerged from the trees, tracing the line of the fence. Despite the terrain, he hadn’t altered his parachute shorts or sleeveless shirt, though he’d added to the ensemble an orange camouflage hat and painted his cheeks with streaks of black mud. In one hand dangled the stone-bladed Maquahuitl. With his other hand, he unbuttoned a side pocket of his shorts.
“You okay?”
Liv nodded, still shaken, and displayed bloody fingers.
“Ah, a wounded soldier,” Doug said. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to put you down.”
He grinned, and Liv knew he was trying to set her at ease. She forced a laugh, and it did help break the paralyzing shock. From his pocket Doug withdrew a giant-sized Swiss Army knife. He set down Maquahuitl, extracted from the knife a set of mini pliers, and knelt beside her. He took gentle hold of the wire and, after a couple of twists, a barb popped free.
“Maybe three more. Stand still and try not to bleed to death.”
“As opposed to what?”
Doug pincered the next barb and shrugged. “Going back.”
He didn’t look at her when he said it. Radiating from her gut, as if released by the punctures, Liv felt the broil of abashment. Doug was far from stupid. He knew she didn’t believe. But if anything was clear from the careful way in which he held her hips so as not to pinch her skin, he wanted her there anyway. With the quickness of a Black Glade wind gust, her every anxious emotion was overcome by gratefulness for this friend, who had, in some ways, given her back her father, and who, despite their divergent beliefs, had never quit believing in her.
“Freed,” Doug announced, “to crash into other fences.”
“So chivalrous of you, sir.”
Doug pocketed the tool, picked up Maquahuitl, and handed her Mist, first using it to gesture into the shadows.
“We better catch up. He’ll worry.”
“Right.” Her dad would indeed worry, but for a make-believe reason: It was an encirclement of skinners that had waylaid Liv, not a remnant of some farmer’s failed attempt to keep Black Glade in check.
They followed bad, crackling coughs until they came upon Lee standing dead center in a clearing, taking readings from his compass. He blinked heavy lids, looking at Doug and Liv through yellowed, red-veined eyes.
“It got away,” he said.
Doug nodded, accepting his culpability, and choked up on Maquahuitl as a promise to do better.
“What did I say about pocket formation, Doug? If you’re on left wing, you need to stay ten or twenty yards ahead, not behind.” Cough. “And Liv. We need to be quiet out there.” Cough, cough. “The closer we get to one—and we were very, very close—the more critical it becomes.” Cough, cough, cough, cough, cough. “You can’t be screaming like that.”
“She ran into barbed wire,” Doug explained.
Gone along with the flesh that illness had peeled from Lee’s face was his ability to hide any emotion. Liv watched the drill-sergeant points of his eyes diffuse as the dad she remembered resurfaced. He beckoned with a thin, trembling hand, the compass rolling loosely around his skinny wrist.
“Let me see.”
He had, of course, a first aid kit in a coverall pocket, and as he set to cleaning and bandaging her gouges, he walked back his critiques. Maquahuitl was the heaviest weapon; Doug’s slowed speed was understandable. Liv’s startled yell was not, after all, entirely inadvisable; war cries were meant to immobilize foes with fear. Liv nodded but suffered a hunch that this was the last of their quests. The wildness of this hunt had to be some sort of climax.
Lee consulted Resurrection Update, as well as a topographic map folded inside it, then tucked both back into his pack. He then picked up the useless bow and quiver, weighed them in opposite hands, and placed them upon the forest floor to be left for future adventurers. Lizardpoint was his natural weapon; anything else would only continue to complicate the hunt.
“Arrowhead formation,” he said. “Doug, you up to taking point?”
It was dusk when the three of them crowded together at one of Black Glade’s edges. It was a literal borderland, a taut wire fence separating them from an abandoned farm. The house’s white paint had been shredded by time. The outbuildings were hammocks of rusted spoil. The dual silos had become dead gods wearing bird-nest crowns. The place was deceased, though it was surrounded by life: hilly grazeland for cows and rich, rolling cornfields. Liv had an eerie sensation that they were trapped inside a maze, bigger than the one Doug dreamed of mowing into the Monk Block and with a gimmick better than the Trick: They hadn’t even known they’d entered it.
Liv looked to her dad for guidance, the last time she’d ever do so.
Lee’s face, pale already, had gone a chalky white. His eyes had gone wide and unbelieving. His lips moved like a fish’s mouth, unable to find enough air to breathe.
“I remember,” he whispered.
“Remember what?” Liv asked, terrified of the answer.
“This place.” He covered his horrified mouth with a hand. “This place.”
Lee’s eyes, looking big enough to drop from his skull, skittered across the outline of the farm, as if each building they landed on gave off invisible, painful rays. It didn’t matter how old Liv was or wasn’t; seeing a parent so terrified triggered a primordial response of equivalent terror.
“Dad,” Liv said.
“There’s so many,” he whispered. “I forgot. I forgot how many.”
“Skinners?” Doug asked.
“How could I have forgotten?” Lee’s voice splintered.
“Dad.” Liv’s voice, too, broke into pieces.
Lee whipped around and gripped Liv’s shoulders.
“I forgot. I forgot this place. I shouldn’t have brought you. I have to do this alone. You need to leave. Both of you. See that field? There’s a road on the other side. Go through the field. Flag down a car.”
“No way,” Doug said. “We’re coming with.”
Lee’s arm lashed out, snagged Doug’s shirt, and pulled their heads close together. He hissed furiously, spittle popping along his pale lips.
“You are not! You do exactly what I say and get away!”
It was the most aggressive Lee Fleming had ever behaved, and it nailed Doug and Liv to the trees. Lee released Doug and frowned at his own hands, perhaps at the person he’d become. Dusk light shone against his battered fingernails, and that was prodding enough. Quickly he retied his boots and pulled on his gloves. He worked his fingers around Lizardpoint’s crocodile-skin grip.
Lee’s lips trembled over clenched teeth as he took a shuddering breath, stood the tallest he could, and fired off a military salute to Doug, the same kind with which Major Dawkins had honored Lee at birthday barbecues. Doug, still stung by Lee’s shouting, blinked in surprise. But what had Lee been teaching him if not to be a proper soldier? Doug’s cowered back straightened, and he returned the salute.
Lee turned to Liv. He grimaced as if his legs were locked inside one of his steel-toothed traps. He opened his mouth to speak, but that, too, looked painful. What he did, then, was nothing, except look sorry, and out of time.
He whirled away, charged the fence, and lowered his ear within inches of the top wire. Liv felt eviscerated, barely able to stand, yet still understood. Her dad believed the fence to be electric, and some scrap of rural insight told her that electric fences ran in pulses, and her dad was listening for them. Liv thought she could feel them, each sizzling beat the mirror of her bruised, burned heart. Lee’s hands hovered over the wire, preparing to make his move.
Liv ran, leaving Doug behind and colliding with her father so hard he had to roll to the side to avoid the electric fence. Lizardpoint’s metal pick clacked against Mist’s sharpened blade. Somehow both father and daughter had turned lethal, too sharp to be held safely, but they held each other all the same.
“Don’t go,” she cried. “Please don’t go, please don’t go.”
He held her cheeks in his hands, but all she could feel were his gloves’ silicone grips.
“You have to let me go,” he whispered. “I have unfinished business.”
She tried to press her face into his chest, but he held her firm.
“I know you don’t believe in any of this, Liv.”
She was exposed, shamed, but also desperate to tell him that he was wrong, she did believe that he believed, and wasn’t that enough?
“Dad, I—”
He shook his head, out of time.
“It’s all right. Doug … he wants to believe. He needs to believe. He doesn’t have the choices we’ve always had. You’re a doubter like your mother. That’s good. That means you’re smart. Just listen to me, sweetie. Listen to me and then let me go. I want to say I’m sorry. For everything. How I ruined everything our life used to be. What I’ve done to your poor mother. I just … forgot things. And now it’s all coming back.”
None of it made any sense to Liv. She had a gutful of protests, enough to last all night, all day, all her life, but the stiff surfaces of his gloves slid down her face and took hold of her shoulders. He managed a pained smile and flicked his eyes up to the shadowing skies. His last words were not his, but James Galvin’s, his favorite verse, one he told seniors on the final day of class, inspiration for their future.
“‘Perhaps you didn’t realize,’” he quoted. “‘Anything can happen under a sky like this.’”
Gently, like Mr. Fleming the husband, the father, the English teacher, he held her away from his body. He unzipped his pack and withdrew his copy of Resurrection Update, wrinkled from study, bloated by rain, stained by coffee, studded with sawdust. He held it out to her. She stared at it. He prodded her in the sternum with the book until she felt her hands wrap around it. She stroked the cover. It was lightweight, she thought, for a soul.
When she next looked up, Mr. Fleming, the pariah, the lunatic, the survivalist, had one hand on a fence post, and having found the gap in pulses he was after, he climbed over the wires. To Liv it was a leap of unimaginable distance, the crossing from one world to another. He landed in a sloppy stumble, but righted himself and walked, then jogged, then ran in the direction of the silos, Lizardpoint at the ready.
By the time Doug joined her at the fence, Lee Fleming was a pale firefly. Doug must have known as well as Liv that they’d never see him again. He hoisted Maquahuitl over his head and brought it down on the fence, staving the wires downward, snapping some, bending the nearest poles inward. It was a mourning rage, violent as a cloudburst, and it would be minutes before it was through, fence posts dented to hell, wires pounded into the dirt, and Doug crying out, perhaps from electrocution, perhaps not, finishing by hammering the ground with his club until his red, grimacing face was lost in plumes of dust.
Liv felt the dry wind from Maquahuitl toss her hair, but she did not flinch. She could feel, extending from the muck of her sorrow, a different emotion, one that, like skinners, she didn’t want to believe existed. The thing was called relief. Life would be difficult without her father. But wasn’t it also true that, in some ways, life would be easier?
The book felt undeserved in her hands. Either her dad was a traitor or she was. She thought of “Sapphic Suicide Note,” and wondered if the book itself, placed into her hands, was the suicide note of her father.
She thrust the book into Doug’s arms. He tried to hand it back, but she shrugged it off. Doug was adamant; in future days, and weeks, and months, he’d keep trying to return it, telling her it was meant for her, assuring her that its poetry, just as Lee had always said, was full of secrets. She refused to talk about it, and as their relationship narrowed over the following two years to little beyond Sunday morning trap checking, Doug quit trying. Lee’s italics, whatever they were worth, belonged to Doug.