Lee Fleming was an indoorsman, if such a designation existed, which made his rapid conversion into survivalist all the more bewildering. In the cold winter weeks following his expulsion from Bloughton High, he did none of the things he’d been told to do. He did not return to the doctor. He did not find a therapist. He did not search for another job. What he did, beginning on Christmas Day and continuing every day thereafter, was spend most of his time in the garden shed.
Aggie watched from parted curtains. She said to Liv, “Your father just needs some time,” but Liv knew that she said it for her own benefit. Each day her mother didn’t investigate what was going on back there, the glue holding their family together further dissolved. It wasn’t that Liv didn’t understand her mom’s mind-set. As long as they didn’t know what Lee was working on, they could perpetuate any harmless fantasy they wanted. Pretty soon they’d have a cute little fence for a new flower bed, maybe a fun novelty mailbox. Liv agreed with her mother’s assessment that “time” was the operative word. The ethic with which her father worked suggested he believed he had little of it to spare.
When he did come inside, late at night, Aggie didn’t ask the right questions, and Lee didn’t volunteer answers. He didn’t volunteer anything. Without washing the oil from his hands—the oil was a clue, but of what?—he’d hunker in a chair that had a forest view and study a library text about welding or soldering or riveting—more clues. He was distracted to the point of forgetting to eat or sleep, and often he’d be in the same chair, still reading, when Liv woke up. In some ways, Liv realized, her father had been abducted. In other ways, he’d become the alien.
Plus, he was sick. There was no pretending it wasn’t true. Many nights, Liv was awakened by the sounds of vomiting. He went on coughing jags and didn’t notice the specks of blood sprayed over his shirt. His clothes began to look like they’d gotten larger, an absurd idea, but easier to accept than the weight he was losing. His skin looked like putty. Sometimes he’d sweat profusely for no reason. He didn’t have to say anything for Liv to know what he thought: The skinners, in their experiments, had infected him with something. He did not have forever to live. Whatever he was going to do, he had to do it now.
Aggie’s attempts to get him to the hospital were ignored. She sank into quiet despair, only to speak up again after the packages began arriving. It was reminiscent of the thirty-five copies of Resurrection Update deluging the house years ago, except these boxes were much larger and heavier. Some Lee unpacked right there in the kitchen, tools mostly, pliers and calipers and straightedges and hacksaws, while the larger crates he muscled into a wheelbarrow and transported to the shed. It was Aggie who received the bills for these purchases.
While they fought about it, Liv did her homework, tracing the same words, the same numerals, over and over, until she sliced through the notebook paper.
“This isn’t hundreds of dollars, Lee. This is thousands. If you won’t think of yourself, your own health, think of us, Liv and me.”
“It’s necessary.”
“None of what you’re doing is necessary! You need to stop!”
“When I’m done.”
“When will that be? We can’t pay the bills, Lee.”
“This is more important.”
“Than eating? Than keeping our home? Our savings are disappearing.”
“Saving—that’s what I’m trying to do.”
Aggie had forbidden any guests until Lee got better, but Doug called Liv all the time, positive that he could help this man who’d been more of a dad to him than his own father, and when Liv broke and said okay, Doug was tossing his bike onto their lawn an hour later, a five-foot-five fifteen-year-old hero in parachute shorts who apologized to Aggie for his unannounced visit and stated his intent to go check out the shed. His kid courage broke the final fiber of Aggie’s self-delusion. One tear fell from the corner of each eye.
“At least take him a coat. And shoes. He went out today in pajamas and bare feet. It’s February. This is Iowa.”
The previous night’s snow allowed Doug and Liv to follow Lee’s footprints step for step. Scrap wood, chicken wire, fence rods, and sundry other debris had been tossed from the shed to free up room inside. They twisted through it, and Doug knocked on the door.
“Lee?”
He responded with viper quickness. “Doug?”
“Uh-huh. Can we come in?”
A pause. “Okay.”
The door creaked open, and Liv almost sobbed with relief. The shed wasn’t some wildly colored, strobe-lit phantasmagoria in the style of Oliver! The ten-foot-square storage space had been transformed, with surprising competence, into a functional work shed, lined with pegboards from which hung assorted tools and wedged with tables upon which sat the machines driving the Flemings to financial ruin. Atop other tables, far more ominously, sat other objects covered by dusty sheets.
Lee grimaced an apology while he finished taking a note. Not in a journal, but rather a copy of Resurrection Update, the autographed one his students had gifted him, covered with sawdust. Its presence seemed both perverse and natural. Her father found poetry everywhere; it made sense he’d find it inside his own madness.
He shut the book and looked up. It seemed that Lee Fleming, emcee of a hundred events, practiced hand shaker, had forgotten the basics of interaction. His hands tried his skinny hips, the tabletop, and other places to settle, before he crossed his arms, then uncrossed them. His grin, too toothy now inside his gaunt face, was just as faltering. Liv, though, found faith in it. Her father was looking at her and Doug, really looking, like he hadn’t at anyone since going missing. Hope filled Liv’s chest, so much of it she couldn’t speak. Doug, though—today, no one could stop Doug.
“How you doing, Lee?” Doug asked.
“I…”
“Building stuff?”
“Well…”
“Looks like you’re really into it.”
“I am. I suppose I am.”
Keep him talking, Liv prayed.
“We got a coat and shoes for you.”
“Oh?”
“Although it’s pretty warm in here.”
“Yes.”
“School’s not the same,” Doug said. “Kids miss you.”
“Oh. That’s nice. That’s nice to hear.”
“Other than that, you’re not missing much. Same old junk.”
“Well, yes, I suppose that’s true.”
“Anyway, I haven’t seen you in a while.”
“No.”
“Guess I kind of missed you, too.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re supposed to say, ‘Doug, life has been meaningless without you.’”
Lee’s upper lip twitched—the start of a real smile. Liv leaned forward, desperate to see it completed.
“You’ve been…” Lee searched. “Getting along?”
Doug shrugged. “I guess. Restocking from the New Year’s blitz.”
Lee gazed at the ceiling, as if he could see the sky, as well as things up there that might need scaring off with explosions. Doug took the opportunity to glance at Liv, and the sharp cunning of his look almost made her sob in gratitude. He gave her a quick nod; he was going for it.
“So, what are you making?”
Lee looked back down, blinked, and then, in a moment Liv knew she’d never forget, a warmth lit up his eyes, and he grinned like he used to whenever he saw Liv and Doug, then lifted a hand nicked with cuts and beckoned them closer, as in years past he’d done to show off costume designs or set blueprints. They crowded close, the sharp resin of sawn wood shooting up their nostrils, the blunt tang of fresh metal giving them headaches. Liv was so close to her father that their arms were touching. She had to force herself not to latch on like a little girl.
It was as if he hadn’t realized how eager he was to share his activities. He introduced the machines like a crowd of new friends—lathe, grinder, drill, welder, table saw—and then ripped the sheets from the concealed objects and jabbered about his creations like they were model trains instead of deadly monsters of metal. He’d always been happiest, Liv recalled, when he was working.
They were traps, Lee said, to catch the skinners when they came back, which they would, though don’t be scared—even though skinners were foxy, no way they’d get past six different kinds of traps. Liv was struck speechless by the long, lubricated teeth of Amputator and the sanded fulcrum and lever of Hangman’s Noose. Back then, the other four traps were in fledgling stages, but already she could sense their menace.
She didn’t have to feign interest; she only had to tamp down her dread. Her dad had made no positive progress since Oliver! He’d spiraled further into obsession. Doug, she thought, was laying it on too thick with his wows and questions, until an uneasy realization settled over her. Doug wasn’t faking. He really thought this stuff was amazing. Later, she’d almost believe she’d seen him crumple his Monk Block Corn Maze plans right there in favor of this wilder infatuation.
Doug lowered his voice and asked the question that took the most courage to ask.
“What did they do to you up there?”
Aggie had shielded Liv from Lee’s detailed chronicle, and until that instant Liv had found it belittling. Not now. She couldn’t handle knowing, she abruptly knew it, and she mumbled some excuse before bolting from the dim, crowded space into the atomic-blast light of a winter’s day. Her father’s confessional tones chased her until she made it to the front yard, where she watched her exhalations turn into unidentified flying objects.
Doug ambled up twenty minutes later, his silence saying everything Liv needed to know about her dad’s suffering. Doug was a blurter by trade; his sudden sensitivity to her feelings riled her.
“You don’t actually believe him, do you?” she demanded.
Doug picked up his bike, leaving a shadow version of it imprinted in the snow. Liv felt like a shadow version of herself, paper-thin next to a friend newly heavied by her father’s report. Doug slung his leg over the crossbar and gave her a maddeningly gentle look.
“How come you’re so sure it’s not true?” he asked.
How naive could you be? Still, she felt reproached, and by the April thaw, all six traps were built, installed, and benefitting from Lee’s regular improvements, which he made with a paranoid exactitude that he took pains to ingrain in them—now that he’d begun to talk to Liv and Doug, he wouldn’t stop. Put the prevailing wind at the trap’s back, Liv. Use existing terrain as cover, Doug. Let’s catch some critters and taxidermy their feet, then run them over the area so it looks natural. Doug repeated each tip softly; Lee took notes in Resurrection Update; Liv wondered how any of this could possibly end well.
It couldn’t: Lee next shifted to weaponry. He explained that it was impossible to know how many skinners would be sent to reclaim him. The craft he’d been taken aboard had carried maybe a dozen, but there could be other ships, even a mothership. Doug, eager to capitalize on his knowledge of explodables, suggested grenades, maybe dynamite, but Lee nixed them. Skinners would smell the gunpowder. Like the traps, the weapons had to be built from raw elements.
Weapons, Lee lectured, historically instilled fear in enemies on sight, as seen in the illustrated Encyclopedia of Arms he’d checked out from the library. Gold leaf, inlaid silver, and intricate reliefs were far outside his artisan ability; even getting components to be symmetrical was difficult. Yet it was this crudeness that instilled his armaments with a berserker’s gap-toothed, punch-drunk intimidation. Within five weeks of bruising workdays, Lee fashioned over twenty weapons, all benighted with names to further gird them with power.
Everyone had a favorite. The weapon Lee slid into his belt before checking the traps was called Lizardpoint, a twenty-inch, fishhook-shaped fighting pick with origins in turn-of-the-century Ghana. The wooden shaft was wrapped in hyena hide (it had cost Lee a small fortune), save for the crocodile-skin grip. Doug’s choice was Maquahuitl, an Aztec club that looked like an oar studded along both edges with thirteen stone blades. Doug’s dumbbell exercises had made him strong enough to wield it, though his shortness made swinging it a tottering, top-heavy effort. Liv, against better judgment, was enchanted by a thrusting weapon favored by late-eighteenth-century Indian rogues, made from two antelope horns bolted together, both tips tapering to steel blades. Lee had dubbed it Mist for how the horns’ ripples looked like mist settling over an imagined Indian horizon.
The shed became known as the Armory. Ever at the ready was a host of other amateur reproductions, each of which hung on a wall within a chalk outline. When space ran out, Lee dangled them from the ceiling on chains.
It was under a red-and-white sky of sunset and snow that Lee paused over his sharpening of the handle of a Russian poleax and gazed at Liv and Doug, snowflakes making his unshaven scruff cottony. Both Liv and Doug audibly caught their breaths, somehow aware of the magnitude and power of the moment.
“If anything ever happens to me,” he said, “and you two have to deal with this on your own, you have everything you need. The traps, the weapons. You know what to do.”
They nodded, so eagerly that snow scattered from their winter hats. They would do whatever he asked, and as soon as possible, so that this anything he suggested might happen to him would never, ever happen. Liv may not have believed in her dad’s story as Doug did, but she believed in her dad, his goodness.
Liv squirreled updates on her father for her mother, concocting positive spins. Both Liv and Aggie agreed Doug’s influence had been a godsend; when he wasn’t coughing or vomiting, Lee was talking, smiling, interacting. But the sight of her husband, daughter, and daughter’s friend in the backyard cavorting with lethal weapons appeared to be too much for Aggie. She began to turn away from Liv’s reports, jabbering about the night job she was about to start at the steakhouse, won’t that be fun?
She started the job on Lee’s forty-ninth birthday. Before she left, the three of them sat around the table staring at a cake no one except John wanted. What do you give a forty-nine-year-old alien abductee who appeared to be dying? Aggie had chosen a seventy-dollar, waterproof, scratch-resistant, oil-filled compass with adjustable wristband. Her husband had disappeared for four days once; if it happened again, maybe the compass would help him get back.
Lee, however, seemed to take the compass as proof that Aggie believed him—at last, she believed him! He busted open like a dropped pumpkin, exploding with tears. With a bony arm, he reached blindly for Aggie, and she let herself be pulled in. Liv, watching this, felt ill—hers was the unhealthiest family alive. Then her dad reached for her, too, and instantly she revised her thoughts. How unhealthy could a family be that laughed, that sobbed, that embraced like this?
“This’ll help me get those skinners,” Lee wept. “I love you both so much.”