The next day, her new life began. It would be one with no Monica, no Krista, no coaches, no teachers. Those who’d always believed Liv had made a brisk comeback from the tragedy of her father would now believe she’d succumbed to the same mental deficiency that had brought him down. Bruno Mayorga was the exception—he didn’t know enough about the past to see it saturate her. Every time she talked to him, she felt better, filled with unearned hope, and so she’d just have to stop talking to him. She’d just to have stop caring, about everything and everyone—or almost.
Her Bloughton narrowed to Population: 1, Doug Monk, and it was a realm in which he held absolute control. As with the corn mazes he’d plotted as a kid, he put every ounce of his energy and creativity into building something even he could get lost inside. Before leaving her beneath the stars on Saturday night, he’d claimed he had the whole week planned out. And he had.
On Sunday, Doug followed the Army Field Manual ’s humiliation tactics and chased the skinner around the shed, spanking it with the table-leg baton until it collapsed.
On Monday, Doug dug up Liv’s old Chicago Bears helmet to protect the skinner’s skull and rigged up a pulley system that would dangle it like a rabbit for skinning. He’d hunted with his father; these things were second nature.
On Tuesday, Doug brought in John as a “force multiplier,” only to be driven to fury when John tucked his tail and whined.
Liv helped, tried not to think, tried not to feel. Why do we have to? she wanted to beg, but she felt she’d burned up all rights to ask that question by participating in activities that also had no good reason why. The skinner jabbered from within its Bears helmet—Car bow hole car bow hole car bow hole—and Liv smiled and said, “Shh,” to reassure it that the furry four-legged beast, unlike the two-legged ones, wouldn’t harm it.
It was a smile she’d regret on Wednesday. The daytime was like that of the previous two days: hiding her face from anyone at school who might talk to her, hiding her whole self outside at lunch. Time decelerated to a glacial pace the second she entered the Armory and her foot booted the Bears helmet across the floor. Doug was already there, which meant he’d ditched school early. He stood before the hoisted, dangling skinner, holding a pair of pliers and a paring knife and wearing a barbecue apron streaked with blood.
Things crunched underfoot. Liv looked down, expecting a plastic piece from the helmet. Instead she saw most of the skinner’s teeth, those irregular, misshapen gravestones. Closer to Doug, plopped red and meaty on the floor, was its tongue.
Doug shook his tools to clear them of blood.
“It’s done talking,” he said.
“Doug.” Her head thundered. “What did you do?”
He glanced back at her with wobbly, bloodshot eyes.
“This isn’t a buddy for you,” he croaked. “You gotta remember what we’re doing, Liv.”
Liv braced a hand to the wall so she wouldn’t pass out. This was her punishment for cooing at it, petting it. Doug had noticed, of course he had, and now there would be no more words from the skinner, not ever, and it was all her fault, because she had forgotten their respective roles: torturer and tortured. Liv fought down nausea and sent a silent plea to the skinner to try to not make any new noises, not ever. It might be its lips that went next.
Doug staggered away from the skinner. He peeled off his blood-soaked gloves and dropped them to the floor with two squishes. He shambled for the door while ripping the wet apron from his body, as if shedding a final skin. His expression tried for pride, but it was a mask nibbled away by an underlying acid of revulsion.
“See if you can stop—”
He gagged. He may have used his knowledge of hunting and trapping to perform his crude surgery, but it didn’t look like he’d found pleasure in it. Maybe punishment for Liv was not how he’d viewed it. Maybe he’d been trying to rescue Liv from feeling too much for the subject. Maybe this was standard procedure, buried somewhere in Army Field Manual 2-22.3.
Stop what? Stop the bleeding? Stop me? Stop yourself? Liv didn’t know: Doug was gone, their shortest session ever was also their most brutal. With the door still wide open and banging, Liv grabbed the first aid kit and rushed to the skinner’s side. This was beyond contusion, bruise, or scratch. She knew how to lower the skinner from the pulley system and did so, arm muscles straining, until the skinner struck down. Instantly, blood bubbled from its mouth like hot tar. It was choking on it, hard and fast.
Liv reached for it with both hands before hesitating. She’d touched this thing dozens of times, but gloved and with bandages between their skins. This would be a touch of a different order, but there was no time to blanch. She took the skinner by both its arms, her fingertips sinking into its squashy skin, and tipped it onto its side. A cannonball of blood fired from its mouth, followed by other, smaller blasts. But it was breathing, air scraping hoarsely over the craggy remnants of its teeth.
How in the world, how in their worlds, could it be that Liv wanted to lean down, place her dry skin and clean clothes against the mucky, tumorous flesh of this inside-out monster, which had perpetrated who knew what violence against her father, and embrace it with all her might, never minding the slime of its earholes, the fishy wobble of its eyeballs, the blood-stench of its mouth? It was a shock of a thought; instead, she pulled the gauze from the kit and began unwinding a large strip into a ball it could bite on, the only thing she could think of to do.
“You’ll make it,” she whispered. “I believe in you.”
Thursday, the day that would change everything, Liv strode directly from her final class to the station wagon and sped through spitting rain under the yoke of a blasting, all-day headache. It was the headache, though, that had given her the idea: The skinner needed drugs. There was no telling how it would react to them, but if it could eat their food, maybe it could process their pharmaceuticals. She could not let it exist at this level of pain any longer.
In the bathroom, she read the ibuprofen label. Headache. Muscular aches. Toothache. Menstrual cramps. Fever. Some of it had to be applicable. She tapped a couple of pills into her palm, stuck her face beneath the faucet to swallow them, and then tapped a dozen more for the skinner and put them in her pocket. Only then did she recall an old prescription of Vicodin she’d once spotted in Aggie’s bedside drawer. She darted there, found the bottle, and took most of the pills—perhaps her mom would be as fuzzy about pill count as she was wine.
Back in the bathroom, Liv gripped the sink and wondered how she’d gotten this far so fast, able to visualize interacting with the skinner without disgust. She glanced at her reflection in the mirror. There was her answer: The face that disgusted her now was her own. She watched her eyes grow tears. Tears had plagued her since the first day of school, yet so far this week had vanished, and she knew why. Because Lee Fleming had vanished, too, from her mind, from Doug’s mind. What they were doing in the shed no longer seemed to have anything to do with Lee; it had become its own self-perpetuating machine, powered by its own bad fuel.
She heard Doug’s car rattle and gasp into the drive beneath the lulling patter of rain. She considered sprinting to the Armory and using her recently gifted padlock key to get some Vicodin down the skinner’s throat before Doug appeared, but it was too risky. She stared out at the shed, small and innocent in the rain, and watched Doug enter, the lights go on, and then, quite ominously, nothing else about it changed at all.
She entered the Armory to find the skinner still cuffed and curled into its usual crumple, and Doug seated on a table. The last she’d seen him, he’d been gagging over what he’d done to the skinner. He looked to be fully over it; he was now reading. Not military memos, either, but Lee’s personal, autographed copy of Resurrection Update, the water-warped one he’d forced into Liv’s hands before he vaulted the farm’s electric fence.
Doug had his nose deep in the book’s gutter; Liv could see the faint squiggles of the notes her dad had made over his final months. Liv shook off the rain and walked past Doug without a word, choosing to ignore the sight. It was impossible; it was like her dad was in the room. She checked behind her to make sure he wasn’t. It was just Doug, not only reading but writing, as if he were the author chosen to complete a master’s unpublished work.
Liv picked up the first aid kit and knelt so her body blocked Doug’s view of the skinner. Instantly, its arm, that three-fingered, bone-knuckled deformity, strained toward her. She sensed nothing of menace in the move. In fact, if the thing’s wrists weren’t tied, she felt that its hand would be pawing her like John’s when he’d been a scared puppy, as if to beg, Please, please, please never leave me again.
Liv’s emotions splashed into one another: moved, repelled, dejected, alarmed. She swept them away and got down to the business of pretending to conduct a typical nurse’s survey. She knew she should wait until Doug left before slipping the skinner painkillers. But its big, scared eyes bulged at her, pleading, and anxiety screwed into her gut. She tilted her head slightly to listen. The scritch-scritch of Doug’s pencil was a knifepoint along her skin, but she couldn’t let that stop her.
She slid the water bowl closer in case the skinner choked on the pills. She finned her hand and forced it into her pants pocket, a difficult maneuver while squatting. She shifted a bit, hoping it looked natural, until her fingertips touched the curved plastic of the Vicodin bottle.
Blackness enveloped them.
“What are you doing?”
It was Doug, blotting out the fluorescents, and Liv screamed, though somehow she kept it inside, her ribs shaking painfully from the gulped decibels. Her instinct was to fling herself over the skinner and cry for Doug to get the fuck out of the shed and off her property, but it wasn’t an instinct she had time to evaluate or understand. She slipped her hand out of her pocket with what she hoped looked like nonchalance and resisted the urge to turn.
“What does it look like?” She tried to sound affronted. “If you’re going to sit there reading, I’m going to see how its mouth is healing.”
“I’m only reading because I was waiting for you.”
“You didn’t wait yesterday before cutting its tongue out.”
Doug sighed. “I’m sorry. But caring about its stupid sounds wasn’t going to help, you know? It was just going to trick us into feeling sorry for it.” His voice became gentler. “I just thought we could work on A together. Like we did at the start.”
Now Liv did turn, pivoting on a sneaker.
“Did you just call it ‘A’?”
“Huh? Oh. I’ve been”—he gestured vaguely—“taking notes. It’s just shorthand.”
“Shorthand for what?”
Doug shrugged. “Subject A.”
“What’s the point of A,” she asked slowly, “if there’s no B?”
Doug grunted with exasperation, turned away, and swiped up Resurrection Update.
“I’m doing everything this book tells me to do.”
“The poems? My dad’s notes on poems?”
But for the first time since she forced Doug to take the book by the fateful electric fence, Liv wanted to know what her father had written in it, not to mention what Doug was adding. She looked hard. From here, she could see her dad’s handwriting, but also Doug’s, along with Doug’s sketches—the kind of tidy designs he used to make for the Monk Block Corn Maze.
Liv flinched when Doug slapped the book against his opposite palm.
“You’re supposed to be behind me in this. We’re supposed to be together.”
“We are together.” She said it but couldn’t make herself believe it.
“Then you shouldn’t have to ask why I call it Subject A, Liv! Of course I call it Subject A. We have to be ready for that possibility. We have to know what works on Subject A to know what’ll work on Subject B and Subject C and Subject D and Subject E.”
“This isn’t a prison, Doug.”
“Yeah, Liv, it is. Some places have always been prisons and always will be. Like high school? Like Bloughton? But right here, this shed, is where we rearrange all of it. This is a prison we run. This is where we’re in control. I read you those military memos! Weren’t you listening?”
The Armory was silent but for a bug suiciding against a bulb. Liv did not speak, did not move. This boy looked like Doug. The long black hair, thick as carpet. The vulpine cheeks, the bulging arms. But was he still the Doug Monk she knew? And her, down here on the floor, was she still Liv Fleming? Or had the things that had gone on in this shed changed them as deeply as if on a molecular level?
“I just want to stay on track,” Doug said. “There’s a lot coming up to look forward to. I’m just barely into the army manuals. I’m going to try Fear Up Mild this week and then Fear Up Harsh next week. I can’t do them alone. It takes two agents to play the roles. We’ll get all the way to Shock and Awe, I promise, but I can’t do it alone. Okay?”
“What,” she asked, her voice trembling, “are you trying to accomplish?”
The appalled, betrayed look Doug gave her was like the forward-slanted blades of Hard Passage, digging into her flesh the second she tried to back her way out of the trap. She could feel her skin pull and tear. Her next words came out from a voice not only trembling, but falling apart, a crumble of octaves and inflections.
“Why don’t you just…” She swallowed and it hurt. “Doug, why don’t you just kill it?”
His eyes flooded red with anger, but also tears.
“That’s not what Lee meant when he said, You know what to do,” he said in quiet disbelief. “That’s not justice. That’s not revenge.”
Liv turned away and dug into the first aid kit. She pulled on the gardening gloves with shaking hands and reached into the skinner’s mouth to extract the blood-hardened gauze. She saw Doug’s shadow slip away, heard the scuffle of his shoes, listened to the purr of paper as he readjusted his grip on Resurrection Update. His steps to the entrance were slow, as if the book’s 280 pages weighed a pound each. The door creaked open. Liv pressed her eyes shut.
“You know what I think?” His voice was as soft as the misting rain. “I think you’ve been right all along. Maybe there’s other skinners out there. Maybe there’s not. But what A can do, what A can definitely do, is change everyone’s minds about Lee. You’re right—that’s what we owe your dad. And I don’t think it’s too late to make that happen, you know? And in a way where someone can’t just see A and suddenly haul it away like it never existed.”
Liv opened her eyes. The skinner’s blinkless orbs were fixed upon Doug, and so she looked that way, too; it seemed important to see what A saw. Doug was paused at the threshold, his face tilted into the drizzle. The shed’s blazing bulbs slid like liquid fire from his back as he exited. A silver sheet of rain rippled, and a gust of wind began to close the shed door behind him. Liv was frightened by his silent exit, yet did not pause. She stuffed her hand into her pocket and yanked out the bottle of pills.