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.