“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.
14.