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.”
10.
Liv’s fingers were all over the place, drained of dexterity as if they’d been severed. Three apps, clownlike in their jolly, trivial purposes, popped open before her sweaty digits managed to hit the Contacts app. It leaped to her Recents, but Doug wasn’t there—damn her for letting Doug slide off the edge of her world. Her finger hit Favorites, but Doug wasn’t there, either. Had she deleted him from the list? Doug, who’d answered his phone every time in life it had mattered? She scrolled and found his name, those comforting four letters.
Of course he answered right away.
Of course he knew something was wrong.
“Liv? You okay?”
“There’s—we—in the, in the—”
“Slow down, slow down. Is somebody hurt?”
“No—yes—there’s—the, in the trap—”
“Oh my god, I knew it.” Doug’s voice, right off, was hoarse with emotion. “Don’t move. Don’t move.”
She still expected a bicycle’s gravel skid, even though Doug had been driving a decade-old junker for a couple of years. Its skid was louder and throatier, coming ten minutes after the call. Liv sprinted the width of the house and unlocked the front door, and he came barreling inside, taking her by the arms, the kind of physical contact he would never initiate except that she’d clutched at him first, at his sleeves, which, of course, didn’t exist, her ragged, paint-chipped nails digging into his biceps.
“I don’t know what—it’s back there, Doug, in the—I saw it, in the trap, it’s—”
“Okay, shh, Liv, c’mon, shut up.”
She pointed toward the backyard, the dark impossibilities of a hidden world.
“Yeah?” Doug’s eyes shone like new pennies. “You sure?”
She nodded. He broke away. Doug still knew where everything was. He gathered the lantern flashlight from the laundry room, the softball bat from her bedroom closet, her old jump rope from the basement toy chest, a chef’s knife from the kitchen drawer. He took the flashlight and bat and gave her the rest.
“No,” she said. “We can’t, we can’t go—”
“Listen to me. We need to check this out. Make sure you’re right.”
“I don’t want to see it again, I don’t—”
“You’ll be fine. Stay right behind me. Okay? Stay directly behind me.”
The two cracks of the door’s lock and knob were like double-barrel shots. Liv cowered, and when she recovered, she saw Doug leaping down the steps, his pale arms reflective in the night, the black lawn mowed by the flashlight’s beam. His bold charge gave Liv a surge of confidence. She ran after him into a night the temperature and texture of sweaty skin, the dream objects of knife and rope transforming into actual physical objects in her hands.
Doug ripped a blue tarp from a rotten pile of wood, wadded it, jammed it under an armpit.
In the woods the flashlight was a chisel chipping through old black paint. Doug would scramble down a slope, and Liv would feel a hundred miles away, only to scramble down the same slope and crash into Doug, her brandished knife zinging against his metal bat. The night kept tensing, flexing, feinting. She felt pummeled, though nothing more lethal than a twig touched her.
The instant the flashlight beam struck metal, they both pulled back, but it was too late. All the expected colors and textures—brown, gray, green, rough, stony, leafed—were disrupted by a thing that was shockingly white and of slippery smoothness, a thing that, worst of all, squirmed. Liv took the knife with both hands. Doug fumbled the other tools, the bat clattering against the flashlight so that the light spun, and the whole forest appeared to tumble down eternity’s hill.
“Stay behind,” Doug gasped, and she did, placing her knifed fist against his spine and taking to the balls of her feet, knees bent, just like all her coaches taught her. She couldn’t see anything beyond the outline of Doug’s long, messy hair. She felt him shuffle a few steps closer, and she closed the gap so that her fist remained at his back. It was all that kept her from falling through a chasm into hell.