Emerging from the Armory that first night was hard. The gray predawn slid across their skin like cold silt, gumming their eyes so they couldn’t see the blood on their hands and clothes, clotting their ears so they couldn’t hear the thing’s heaving on the opposite side of the door. Liv was reminded of every time she’d crept out back to listen for her father’s noises on the other side of the same door, just to make sure his illness hadn’t overtaken him and he was lying there dead.
In stark contrast to the punishment she and Doug had rained upon the skinner for who knew how long, they stood in the grass and shuffled their feet like strangers, until finally, using little more than grunts to converse, they found a way to jam boards against the shed door.
“I’ll buy a lock,” Doug murmured.
“It’s late.” It sounded like her mouth was filled with moss. “Or it’s early.”
Their exhausted nods goodbye were seen only from peripheral vision.
Then it was Saturday. She hauled John into her bed, a rare treat for him, and buried her face in his neck fur. Her head pounded and stomach lurched. Her mom, curious by midday, accepted Liv’s excuse that she was sick. Liv didn’t eat until her mom had left for the Saturday dinner shift, and then just crackers and water. So many possible actions and reactions whirled through her head she could not isolate any one of them. She didn’t look out the back windows until it was almost dark, and only because she had to confirm that the boards were still in place in front of the Armory door. They were.
Then it was Sunday. How many Sundays in a row had Doug knocked on her window to get started checking the traps? Not today. She woke up early anyway. Her morning run—maybe if she went through the motions, she could wipe her brain for a little while, use adrenaline to alleviate the nausea. But as she got dressed, her back and arm muscles ached and she knew why, and she gagged over the sink and splashed water on her face and didn’t dare look in the mirror. She felt as ill as her dad had been during his final year. She curled back into her bed, John’s nose ice cold against her feverish skin.
Only in the afternoon did she force herself into the backyard, each step like a dare, until she got close enough to see that Doug had been there at some point to screw thick metal collars to door and frame and secure a giant padlock through both. Liv wondered if she should feel affronted that he had taken the liberty without her, but instead felt thankful. One of them had to hold it together, and apparently it wasn’t going to be her.
She held her phone in her hand. It felt heavy with significance. She could text Doug, ask him how in the world he was dealing with this. She could call 911, get them out here to make the whole mess disappear, if only her mind wasn’t so conflicted. Would she, who’d mercilessly beat up the thing, be damning herself to a life where any Internet search would bring up her face and details on what she’d done? She didn’t know; she couldn’t think that far. She needed another day. Or two, or three.
School was an assembly-line factory staffed by workers who produced pieces of paper of no consequence. To avoid morning interactions with her friends—was she even capable of speech?—Liv hid on the bottom floor, where no one would see her shaking shoulders, where the shadowy, indistinct hallways perfectly mirrored her mind’s crowded confusion.
When the lunch bell rang, she headed for a far-flung bathroom inside which she could hide some more, but Krista intercepted her, waving excitedly like it was the first day of school all over again, like last week hadn’t happened—if only that were true. Liv forced a smile; the lines of her face felt carved into her cheeks with a putty knife.
“You okay?” Krista asked.
“Mm-hm.” It was the only sound she trusted herself to make without her voice cracking in half, after which who knew what might happen? Sobs breaking out in hot, wet splashes? Jags of ugly confessions splattering like acid?
“Something’s wrong,” Krista surmised.
“Nn-nn,” Liv lied.
Krista put her hand on Liv’s elbow. Flesh against bone—Liv had to bite down to keep from jerking away and kicking out, transported back into the nightmare of the shed. Instead of Krista’s kind smile and patient gaze, it was the skinner’s whorled jaws and bugged eyes. Liv told herself to be calm, be calm, be calm.
“I think I know what it is,” Krista said.
Of course she knew, Liv thought wildly. The evidence must be pressed into every detail of Liv’s face. Guilty, shifting eyes. Veins ballooning her temples with a panicked pulse. Literal blood and fluid crusted in her hair. Liv felt her spinal column slump, the beginning of a full collapse, and could feel the truth frothing at the base of her throat, ready to fizz upward and spill. Unconsciously she gripped Krista back and opened her mouth with a gasp, ready to confess.
“Don’t let Monica get to you,” Krista said.
Liv blinked at Krista as if she, too, were an alien being. Krista smiled gently.
“So you miss a couple meets. You think anyone’s going to care in a few weeks?”
Liv processed Krista’s words individually, like unwrapping mysterious packages. Had she said meats? Liv pictured the skinner’s damp, piled organs. No, meets—cross-country meets. Liv distantly recalled a personal history as brittle as ancient papers. She thought she might like to forge a path back to those delicate, insignificant concerns, but couldn’t see the way. She was lost, as if inside one of Doug’s proposed mazes, and she was so scared.
“People get so wrapped up in their little dramas,” Krista continued. “I mean, it’s high school.”
Liv nodded, wobbly. “Uh-huh.”
“You’ll come back, we’ll win a meet, and you know Monica. She’ll be kissing you on both cheeks.”
Nodding was a way to keep Liv’s heart beating. “Yeah.”
Krista squeezed her arm. “Good. So let’s eat? Or are you sitting with Mr. Latino Dreamboat again?”
Bruno Mayorga hadn’t crossed Liv’s mind in three days. Nothing good in the slightest had. Memories of his face, voice, and body language touched her like John’s nose had in bed, unpleasantly pleasant, a good thing that she, having done bad things, no longer felt she had permission to accept.
“I just—” Liv pointed. “Bathroom.”
Inside a toilet stall, she pressed her hot forehead against cool paint, listening to other girls come in, do their thing, and leave, everything so wildly typical, while a force inside her told her to start running through the halls, screaming to everyone that they were all sheep blind to the existence of wolves, and that they’d deserve what they got if they didn’t listen to Lee Fleming’s warning, albeit three years late.
She saw Doug once, slouching down the hall and clutching a textbook like a shield. Even from afar, Liv could see Doug’s knuckles were torn the same as hers. He moved along, avoiding everyone’s eyes as usual, but when his gaze swept across hers, he held it. Liv felt faint, but thought she could read his thoughts.
They had to feed it. Unless they wanted it to starve.
And that’s not what they wanted, was it?
Krista had reminded Liv of the two cross-country meets from which she was banned, but according to Principal Gamble’s edict, she was back on the practice squad today. Liv didn’t waste time deliberating over whether or not to go. She bolted from school at the final bell, got in the station wagon, and on the way home held her phone in a sweaty hand, desperate to call Doug but distressed by the vague, criminal ramifications of establishing phone records.
Instead, she got home, sat trembling on the front stoop, and waited. She knew him. He’d come. A half hour later, he did. His junker pulled into the driveway, and he got out, and she stood up, instantly feeling a bit stronger, and they nodded as if this were the five hundredth day of this new life together rather than the second. They convened in the kitchen, where Doug fished out a Pop-Tart and gnashed it.
“How was your day?” He sounded tentative, hypersensitive to her reaction—all new tones for him.
“I don’t know.” It was the truth: Her head, her heart, her gut were in tangles, but she had no hard recollections of the day’s events. “I just keep thinking … No one else at school…”
Doug nodded excitedly. “I know. No one has any idea. Of what’s here. Of what’s in the universe. It’s incredible. Only we know. Liv, we’re the only ones.”
Liv smiled weakly. Doug’s eyes were as brilliant as they’d looked back in the days of designing the Trick into corn-maze schemata. His life, Liv knew, had been one of lack: no real parents, no close relatives, no other friends, no money, no worthy possessions. Here, at last, he had something no one else in the world had. He would have a plan to go with it. Of course he would.
Doug grinned and unpacked a bag of food from home. A dented can of green beans. A half loaf of bread. Freezer-burned chicken tenders. A bag of frozen mixed vegetables. Liv, glad for a task, explored her own kitchen crannies. A box of frozen mozzarella bites. Nilla wafers. A banana. A bag of Skittles. On impulse she added a foil pack of Pop-Tarts.
The walk out back was easier with Doug. Together they hauled away the pile of wood from the shed door, and Doug selected the padlock key from his key chain. They shared the same sort of glance, Liv thought, of detectives about to bust, guns blazing, into a drug den, and then entered into a familiar dark swirl of dust, a familiar fetid stink, a familiar terrible sight. She could do this. She could do this.
The skinner’s eyes came alive at their intrusion, the same as before, but everything else was different. Its body, hanging slack from its wrists, barely moved in its congealed filth and blood. The hard clench of its heart had become a butterfly flutter, and the lungs inflated slowly. The pink wounds and red abrasions they’d caused had swollen and discolored to purples, browns, and blacks. Liv was breathless, frightened all over again. But these changing colors—they did, in a way, feel like progress.
They were as quiet as if in a church. Doug edged closer to the alien, kneeling alongside it while being careful to avoid its puddle of muck. He emptied his bag, unboxed and unbagged each item, and placed them on the floor in a straight line, as if this was a science experiment, which, in a way, it was. Bread, mozzarella bites, chicken tenders, wafers, mixed veggies, green beans, Pop-Tarts, banana, Skittles: Which, if any, would it lean over and eat? Lastly he took out an old dog bowl of John’s and filled it from a water bottle.
At that, Liv and Doug retreated, latched the padlock, and split up, as prepared as possible for another night of queasy anticipation.
The next day, Liv skipped cross-country again and Doug did not delay, and they returned to the Armory for assessment. It was the first time Liv didn’t feel like the mere sight of the skinner might crumple her. There it was, same as before, horrible and helpless. She didn’t wait for Doug to go first; they both crowded close.
Its choices were unexpected. Liv and Doug scurried outside to whisper about it, easier to do in the dusk light and under a wide-open sky.
“The dog bowl was dry,” Liv hissed.
“Makes sense. Everything needs water.”
“It ate the banana. The whole banana. With just its teeth, no hands. I didn’t see the peel anywhere.”
Doug hadn’t blinked yet. “Same with the chicken tenders. There weren’t even crumbs. And I couldn’t believe the Skittles! I thought—”
“I thought it would choke on them!”
“That’s what I thought! And all the safe stuff, the soft stuff, the bread and beans and Nilla wafers, it didn’t touch them. You think it’s the colors? It likes bright colors?”
“Did you see the Pop-Tarts bag?”
“Chewed right through it.”
They panted together beneath marmalade clouds, faces darkening until they looked like the shadow versions of Liv and Doug that they had, in fact, become. The surrounding insects took the opportunity to establish dominance, chanting louder in rhythmic mockery.
“It doesn’t look good,” Liv said at last.
“The skinner? No shit.”
“I mean … when we found it, it was sort of … clear.”
“And now it’s kind of cloudy,” Doug said. “I know.”
“And the … I guess its membranes? On its elbows and knees? They’re yellow. A bad yellow.”
Doug’s sigh came from a still-obscured face. “It probably has, you know, excrement in its wounds. It’s inevitable.”
Liv retched. This was too much when she could still hear and smell the skinner. She aimed her throat at the lawn, then managed to choke back the sick surge. Doug was probably right, which meant one more confirmation of Lee Fleming’s theories: The feces-covered punji spikes of Abyss made sense after all. Liv coughed to clear her throat. She knew Doug’s concern by how close he edged.
“I’ll take care of it,” he said gently.
“How? Doug, no.”
“I won’t get too close. Lee used to water the saplings, right? I know I saw a rolled-up hose somewhere.”
She coughed some more, wiped her mouth, and nodded. Doug—thank god for Doug. How had she taken him for granted for so long? He was patient and quiet until she felt stronger, and then they walked together into the shed, where they refilled the water bowl and decided in low voices that Liv would acquire more chicken and bananas, and Doug more Pop-Tarts and candy. It was a good distraction from the skinner’s writhing. This must have been what had kept her dad going despite a whole town’s disbelief and disdain: having a course of action was energizing, even rejuvenating.
Wednesday came, growling around every corner. Would she tell someone about the skinner today? An adult who might take action? Did every hour she didn’t put her into some legal jeopardy of which she couldn’t even conceive? Yet she didn’t. Still sizzling like acid at all edges of her conscience was fury over what the thing had done to her dad, fury at the sacrifices it had forced upon her and her mother.
Until she could create a clearer picture, it seemed wise to behave normally, so that day after school, she joined the cross-country team in the locker room. Monica, via artificial warmness, was predictably cold, but Liv was otherwise affectionately received, and she had to cover the tears that sprang to her eyes. In this room, with these girls, in these clothes, she could almost imagine that everything was the same as it had been last year.
Running was hard. Just five days without exercise and it felt like her heart, like the skinner’s, hung vulnerable outside her body.
She was over two hours late to the Armory. She followed the trail of a long, green hose and found Doug squatting at the end of it. The concrete floor was dark gray, wet from having been sprayed down. The skinner was wet as well, having received the same crass cleaning.
“Hi,” Liv said.
Doug nodded but didn’t look at her. He kept spraying. Foam sloshed along the room’s perimeter. Liv pet down her hair, stiff from dried sweat. There was an alien presence in this room, and yet the atmosphere felt like the previous week’s check of the traps: Doug upset and her saddled with the duty to make it better.
“Sorry,” she said. “I went to practice. I thought I—”
“You want to jog around in circles with your friends, be my guest.”
It was a dart into her chest. He made running sound so meaningless. And it was; there was no arguing the point. Doug, however, knew nothing about the burdens of keeping up appearances. Doug Monk could go straight home after school if he liked. No one expected anything of Doug Monk. Liv evened out her breathing, hoping to diffuse the pain in her chest.
“It looks good,” she offered.
“The floor?”
“It.”
Not only was the skinner clean, it had consumed its fill of food and water for a second day. The organs visible under its translucent skin seemed to have brightened and quickened. Its bruises had smoothed into duller, less alarming colors, and Doug had wrapped its ravaged left ankle in gauze and medical tape. Smaller white spots of bandage dotted the alien where the worst of its wounds had refused to heal—wounds that Liv and Doug had dealt.
The skinner chirped.
Liv thought it had to be a sign of returned health. She shut the door and came closer. One factor contributing to the skinner’s seeming return of vitality was that Doug had replaced the dead bulbs overhead with bright new fluorescents. Pockets of the shed long obscured were as bright as if painted white. Doug had pushed Lee’s power tools into a corner and lugged most of the tables behind the Armory to be disassembled. Overnight, the place had become twice the size, ready to accommodate two people’s full ranges of movement. Why they might need so much space worried Liv.
Doug seemed to sense it. He sat against the wall and studied her. He looked different. Not mad, exactly, but no longer patient, either. It looked as if he were trying, and failing, to understand how cross-country practice had served her any purpose.
“Don’t be scared,” he said.
“I’m not,” she lied.
“In a way, I’m glad you’re late. Gave me time to think. I’m sure you want to tell your friends about this, or your teachers, or your mom. Or the cops. I get it. But we cannot—we cannot—tell anyone. There’s stuff we’ve got to figure out first. Important stuff.” He grimaced at the skinner. “Look at this thing. We’re never going to be able to communicate with it in a normal way. It can’t tell us anything.”
“What would it tell us?” She felt young and stupid.
“Jesus, Liv. It might know stuff.”
She locked her jaw shut, abashed. “About Dad.”
Doug raised his eyebrows as if to say finally. He clasped his hands.
“What it could tell us,” he explained, “is if your dad’s still alive.”
Dad, alive. Did she repeat these words aloud, or were Doug’s words echoing off the walls? Regardless, she frowned at the sound. The idea was obscene, little better than dragging Lee Fleming’s corpse from a grave and proclaiming that he’d come home.
“It’s not like his body ever turned up,” Doug said. “Maybe the skinners have had him all this time. Maybe that’s why they’ve come back here. Maybe the skinner had Lee’s compass so it could follow his scent.”
Liv tried to think through this idea, but the gears of her brain, as in all matters regarding her father, grinded against burrs of rust. “Is that what you really think?”
Doug jabbed a thumb at the skinner.
“You think this thing came here to make friends? It’s here on a mission. What we have to do is turn that mission upside down.”
Liv’s eyes whirled across the shed’s daggers, swords, maces, axes, tomahawks, and clubs. What wasn’t there, but she saw nonetheless, was barbed wire tacked onto her stomach; Black Glade’s colossal, spidery trees; a purring electric fence.
“You want to go back out there?” she asked.
“No, Liv. What I’m saying is we need to communicate with this skinner in a language that every single living thing understands. What did Lee say, way back when? ‘If anything ever happens to me, you two know what to do.’”
So Doug remembered it, too. Liv’s knuckles panged, and she looked at them. All week they’d ached, and decent scabs had only begun to build. While she’d been, as he said, jogging in circles with her friends, he’d overhauled the entire Armory, and for an actionable purpose. Here in the bright hospital lights she made a fist and watched the scabs bend, segment, and begin to seep.
“Blood,” she said.
“We make it bleed,” he said. “And shit, why not take that blood and—”
“We spread it around,” she guessed.
Doug snapped his fingers. “All over the woods. If more are out there, they’ll smell it. They’ll know what happens when you send a skinner to the Fleming house, and they’ll stay the fuck away.”
“Hang on.” Her vision was rocking. “Shouldn’t we … the police, someone—if we called them, and we explained…”
“Explain what? You think they’d give a shit about Lee? Think about it, Liv. There’s nothing important about Lee Fleming. About us. About anyone out here in Buttfuck, Iowa.”
“Please.” It was a beg, and she hated its sound. “We’re not … qualified, or equipped, or—”
“When it comes to Lee? We’re more qualified than anyone in the fucking world! They’d take this skinner away from us, study it or whatever, and Lee’d just be forgotten. Roadkill on the highway.”
So many things already hurt, but this was a blow right to her heart. Bloughton had forsaken Lee Fleming at every turn. Wouldn’t the wider world do the same?
“You think … the other skinners … they’d bring him back?” Nine words, but she was out of breath, as if completing her Custer Road circuit. “Like … a prisoner exchange?”
Doug looked away from the skinner but not at Liv; instead, he craned his neck to gaze into the thicket of weapons, the closest things they had to Lee’s remains. Doug’s lips curled downward and trembled.
“If they don’t, then—well, I don’t really give a shit, you know? Because this thing, or this thing’s friends, or this thing’s whole planet…” His voice faltered with a heartbreak he never once betrayed at school. “They hurt Lee. Hurt him bad. Humiliated him. Made him sick. Stole him from us. And I am not going to sit here and take it. I’m going to give it back.”
Doug had sat there and taken it from Billy and other bullies for years. Could that be part of why he was so starving now to react? His teeth were bared like an animal’s. He blinked up at Liv, a single tear glistening down on each of his cheeks, two stripes as vivid as war paint.
“So are you with me? Liv? Are you?”
From both her father and Doug now: You know what to do.
There were bigger, more important teams than cross-country. There was the human team, and here was a chance to step forward like few other people had had the chance. Liv felt a flood of affection for this most loyal of boys, who’d do anything to honor or avenge her father. He stood, shifting from foot to foot like a boxer, and the energy that crackled off his skin landed on her. Doug was flexing his fingers now, another boxer’s trait, and this time she believed it was her influencing him—she was already clenching hers.
Weren’t boxers in movies always fighting for what they believed in? Doug moved toward the skinner. Liv couldn’t see it clearly, but she could hear the moist slither of its limbs as it retracted against the wall, as well as its blank, belligerent chirps. She felt fury, she felt disgust, she felt exhilaration. She followed her friend, fists tight, prepared and willing to break some scabs.