She heard Bruno’s phone ring through her speaker.
She also heard his ring tone right there in the clearing, a few feet away.
Liv’s eyes rolled upward.
Beneath the translucid blue tarp, a soft glow. A phone receiving her call.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh no.”
33.
The call ended, went to voice mail. Liv’s finger slipped down the touchscreen, ended the call, then slipped more, and Bruno’s message, time-stamped yesterday, began to play. It’s Bruno, he said, without his usual verve, though his voice, as ever, was a dozen nuances of tone and spirit. I know you don’t want to talk, and that’s fine, but maybe you’ll listen. I just ran into Doug. Well, he hasn’t seen me yet, but I’m looking right him. He’s at Wilson Hardware. I heard about his thing at your place, and that must be why … why you’re feeling however you’re feeling. So I’m going to talk to him. If you’re not going to tell me what’s up, maybe he will. I just wanted you to know I’m doing this. I’m not trying to be sneaky or anything. I just miss you.
Somehow she had arrived back at the tarp. She was staring straight down at it. Blood oozed from four equidistant punctures. This time she surrendered to tremoring knees, dropped down, took hold of the edge of the tarp, and pulled. The tape held firm. She picked up the pitchfork, feeling a slop of warm blood, and used a tine to pick at the tape. It ripped, and a section of tarp peeled free, and there he was, her beautiful boy.
All the facts from their first-day-of-school get-to-know-you floated back to Liv like petals. Bruno Mayorga, age seventeen, from Nuevo León, into drama, chorus, and tennis, brother to Mia, Elena, and Bianca, so kind and sexy and happy.
“He’s the reason you left me,” Doug said, but it sounded questioning, as if his original motive had broken its zip ties and dragged itself away.
Liv’s eyes crawled down the side of Bruno’s face, across tilled dirt, up the muddied hair of Doug’s legs.
“I made this—” Doug stopped short, then blundered ahead. “Because I love you. Lee, too. I love both of you. So much, Liv, so much. I didn’t mean for Bruno to be—he just came up to me and I—I convinced him to come out—but Liv, just look around. There’s so much land here. No one has to know. Half of this is yours. I’m giving it to you. Why don’t you run it with me? Can’t you even consider it? Can’t you take just one minute and consider it?”
Liv felt his warm hands settle onto her shaking shoulders. Some dumb thing he’d probably seen in a movie, a virile man comforting an emotional woman. Liv’s brain whirled back to their conversation under the stars, all that shit he’d said about pretending to be girlfriend-boyfriend. Perhaps the arrangement had been real for him all this time.
Rage poured from Liv, out of her mouth, nose, eyes, pores. She took the pitchfork in both hands, twisted around, and leaped.
The handle struck Doug on the nose, and he fell back, hands clutching his face. Liv dashed through the dirt like a released hound and threw herself on top of him, thrusting the handle. Doug raised both hands to stop it, and Liv saw blood spurt from a gash in his lip and wash over his teeth, turning them pink. It was nothing at all compared to what they’d done to her dad, and she shoved her weight behind the handle, pounding it against his mouth a second time.
It was the least advantageous method of attack she could have attempted. Her body on top of his was no heavier than Jackson Stegmaier’s on the first day of school, and Doug, his arm muscles ballooning, bench-pressed her just as easily. The pitchfork handle rammed her ribs, and she felt herself being lifted. She fought back with her legs, but it was no good; Doug flipped her onto her back and she rolled, her broken toe and bruised shoulder electric with pain, and when she opened her eyes, she saw a rain of sparks coming straight at her. She was too close to the Roman candles and tried to push herself away, but Doug fell over her like a tree, blocking out the fireworks, the pitchfork his now and shoved into her chest.
Tears dripped from Doug’s red eyes into her own. Veins puffed from his forehead as he pushed the handle harder. Liv gripped it, too, but her arms had no leverage, and the handle pressed against her throat. Doug clenched his bloody teeth and screamed as rockets of colored smoke churned above him.
“I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU!”
The vibrant fireworks were engulfed by black bursts of oblivion. Doug’s sobbing face went dim. Liv’s hands slipped from the pitchfork, and the handle sank like a rolling pin into dough, and she felt bisected, her throat collapsed, and she was dead, she was sure of it, a kernel lost in the corn.
The pressure was relieved. Moments had gone missing. Her torso was torqued, her nose flat to the dirt, her back heaving with needling inhales. She gasped and vomited. Her throat seared with acid blood. She remembered Doug, his weight and heat. Liv turned to her side, her neck throttled with asphyxiating agony. Blotches of red obscured her vision, but there was Doug, a few feet away, still holding the pitchfork, brilliant purple sparks caroming off his shoulders.
He was gaping up at a figure standing beside him.
There came the blur of a swung arm. A thick gray object connected with the side of Doug’s head. Liv saw a lattice of blood spurt from Doug’s ear, made orange by the fireworks. He cried out and capsized, then writhed his body toward the corn. Liv made an inadvertent noise that filled her mouth with blood, and she spat, and choked, and kicked herself farther away to get a better look.
Looming over Doug were the ravaged remains of Lee Fleming, a demon dragged from hell and fire-lit with red smoke. Never had Liv seen him, in skinner form, manage a single step unaided, but now he moved of his own power, scuffling after the crawling Doug. The initial wound from Amputator had never healed, and the bone showing through frayed ankle skin was bowed, either from a torment of Doug’s or from the simple stress of walking, as he’d apparently done, through the maze until he’d won out over the Trick.
The biggest alteration to Lee was not the missing tail, or the missing right eye, or anything else she’d witnessed in the outbuilding’s display. It was the missing half of his left arm, and this time it hadn’t been Doug who’d done the severing. Part of a zip tie was caught on the splintered bone, draped with strings of lacerated flesh. To escape from wherever Doug had tied him, perhaps spurred by the cries of his daughter, he must have chewed his arm off, like animals caught in the backyard traps had so often tried to do.
In his right hand Lee carried a weapon. Not Lizardpoint—it was on a tchotchke shelf in Faddon’s kitchen. Not Mist—it was last seen stabbed into Faddon’s shoulder. What dangled from Lee’s hand, cutting a trench through the dirt, was Maquahuitl.
Lee pursued Doug with tightrope caution. Doug, clutching his pulverized ear, stopped trying to outpace him. Lee’s three-toed feet came to rest next to Doug, nearly stomping his beloved copy of Resurrection Update. Lee’s left eye bulged from its socket, skittering over the long-lost treasure. Doug, too, blinked at the book before staring up at Lee in defenseless awe.
Tears ran down Doug’s cheeks. “Lee … is that really…”
Lee rocked back, Maquahuitl building momentum in larger arcs. Lee’s ankle bone popped with the trauma of so radical a motion, and his dry underarm webbing, once a glistening film, ripped down the center. Lee, though, seemed to be beyond pain. Maquahuitl swooped, a playground swing at its highest crescent. All he had to do was step sideways to deliver a killing blow to the boy he’d caught strangling his girl. Just as likely, all Doug had to do was lean his head into Maquahuitl’s path to erase all guilt and shame.