“It’s not blue,” she managed. “Dad said they were blue.”
“It’s kind of blue.”
“It’s clear.”
“Maybe the lights on the ship were blue.”
“And they’re supposed to be wrinkly. It’s smooth.”
“Because it shed its skin. He said that’s what they do.”
“He said they don’t have mouths.”
“That doesn’t look like any mouth I’ve ever seen.”
“Dad said they don’t have mouths.”
Doug glared, the first time he’d taken his eyes off the alien. “There was the Green Man, right? The Green Man didn’t look anything like the skinners. Maybe there’s different kinds? How am I supposed to know?”
“There was one called the Whistler.”
“Yeah. Right. And it made a sound.”
“This one makes sounds.”
Even amid terror, she recognized the childish idiocy of her comment. She needed to wake the hell up. She shook her head. Still she felt muddy. She slapped her cheek. She bit her tongue. An extraterrestrial being was in her garden shed. No, it was simpler, broader than that. An extraterrestrial being existed. She was looking at something few people had ever seen, and if she didn’t grow up and act like an adult, it might get away, and then she’d be just like her father—a madman raving about something no one else would believe.
She rooted her phone from her pocket. She brought up the keypad. She looked at Doug for support, but he was staring at the alien again. Fine, it didn’t matter. She tapped in 9, then 1, then, because of her trembling figures, a 4, and had to kill the call, then tapped 9, but accidentally twice, and killed the call again, and then with ridiculous slowness tapped 9, then 1, and was poised to press the final 1, picturing the cavalry quickness of the ambulance that had bounded onto the town square the day her dad had lost his mind—or so everyone had believed.
But she didn’t press the final digit, and that millimeter distance between fingertip and touchscreen would haunt the rest of her life. Doug was saying something, a single word, louder and louder until it broke through her absorption, and it took her looking up from her phone to make sense of it.
“Scalp,” he was saying. “Scalp.”
What a peculiar word, Liv thought.
Doug stood at the alien’s side. He looked sick.
“Like a scalp,” he whimpered.
She felt nothing when she stepped alongside Doug. She felt nothing when her phone slipped from her hand. She thought it probable she would feel nothing ever again. As reluctantly as a funeral-parlor guest might turn her eyes to a loved one’s casket, she followed Doug’s pointed finger to the alien’s left hand, which, until then, had been squeezed into a fist. The three thick fingers were splayed now, perhaps because it had no strength left to hide what it carried.
What it held in its palm was not a scalp in the literal sense, but Doug was right. It was a souvenir of conquest stripped off a past victim. The two of them stood shoulder to sweaty shoulder, in silence but for the alien’s wheezing, their ears tuned to the woods, for now it seemed quite possible they might hear the bangs, snaps, and crashes of five other traps being triggered, as there was no mistaking the trophy the skinner held.
It was her father’s wrist compass.
11.
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.