Page 10 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human

Seven

Crane gets sick again that night, which is why he hears the back door open.

He’d always been under the impression that morning sickness wasn’t, like, actually a thing.

A bit of nausea during pregnancy makes sense, sure—there’s a lot of reorganizing going on down there, none of which could possibly feel good.

But it had taken on such a mythic level of cultural shorthand that he’d become skeptical.

Getting sick is movie shorthand for pregnancy, like coughing blood is for dying. There was no way it was legit.

Morning sickness is in fact a thing, he decides, sitting on the cool tile of the en suite bathroom and pressing his forehead against the ceramic of the toilet. He dry-heaves twice and coughs saliva into the bowl. Spits. Wipes his lip with a square of toilet paper.

Only a few more hours left. This will be inside him for only a few more hours.

He scrubs his face, grateful that Aspen took a makeup wipe to his smeared eyeliner the same way they scrub crumbs from Luna’s mouth, and he taps his palm to his chest to calm down.

He knows the drill. Sophie spent her senior year on the verge of vomiting.

Keep moving to distract the gag reflex, but don’t touch the neck or turn the head.

Keep the jaw locked. Breathe through grit teeth.

A few more hours.

He doesn’t want to, but for the first time since the positive test, he touches his stomach.

He digs his fingers into the fat that’s gathered on his belly since starting testosterone.

It doesn’t feel any different under there.

No hard knotting under the skin where a swelling uterus would be.

On the floor, he cradles his phone and looks up the cutoff for a medical abortion.

Nine weeks. A little over two months. That should be fine.

He caught this early—he thinks. Without a period, there’s no way to tell, to count backward or know for sure.

But nine weeks? It can’t have been longer than that.

After this, Levi has to go back to wearing condoms. Or, at least, he can’t cum inside him anymore until they figure out what’s going on. Does birth control mess up hormones? He’ll look that up later.

When the wave of nausea passes, Crane hauls himself up to the sink and drinks from the faucet. Water splutters from his chin and catches in his pubescent facial hair, a gift from his father’s side of the family tree.

Downstairs, the back door grumbles open on its track.

Crane closes the faucet.

Aspen and Birdie have a lot of faith in their sliding back door, and especially in the shoddy latch working in tandem with the don’t-kill-me bar jammed into the track.

Crane can’t remember if the bar was put back in place when they came in yesterday.

Is Luna tall enough to reach the latch? She can’t be.

Unless she’s smart enough to drag over a box to stand on.

He waits for another sound.

Thinks he hears something.

Shit.

Crane slips out of the bathroom, quiet as he can to avoid waking the two so peacefully in bed, and eases into the hall.

The townhouse isn’t huge. There’s the washing machine behind a squeaky folding door, the HVAC closet that never closes all the way, Luna’s room at the end.

Buying a house was a pipe dream, Aspen and Birdie explained once, and the delight of having their place is visible on every inch of the walls.

The mortgage closing date written in pink Sharpie by the baseboard, Luna’s height etched by the stairs, houseplants allowed to anchor themselves to the paint.

Owning a house had always seemed insurmountably nerve-racking to Crane.

The property taxes? The repairs? The responsibility?

No thank you. He’d never given it more thought than that, though.

Growing up, Sophie figured she wouldn’t own anything until her parents died and their four-bedroom colonial ended up in her name, maybe, if she could swing said taxes.

See what it took for Aspen and Birdie to buy a place? A terrorist attack.

Crane peeks into Luna’s room.

She’s soundly asleep on her mattress, surrounded by stuffed animals and a glittery princess canopy.

Shit.

He slides the door shut and braves a glance down the stairs.

Nothing on the landing except a thrifted mirror. No light except the streetlamps dotting the parking lot, shining vague yellow that isn’t truly enough to see by.

If that’s it, then the least he can do is check the back door. Confirm it’s locked, that the noise was just the air conditioner churning in the middle of the night, then crawl back into bed. Curl up in a safe harbor until morning. He’s a grown man. He can do that.

Crane pads silently down to the landing and opens his phone—no messages from Levi, or Jess, just a few concerned questions from Tammy to ignore—to pop on the flashlight.

There’s a man at the bottom of the stairs.

The bullet of fear feels like getting turned inside out.

The back door is wrenched open, the latch is broken, and there’s a man staring at him. It’s not even Levi. It’s some fucker in black work clothes and heavy treads in the fucking July heat, the hood and neck gaiter leaving only a set of beady blank eyes exposed and watching.

Except for the thick black gloves. The left one peeled back to show the hive-bite punched into the wrist.

In this moment, paralyzed with phone in hand, Crane is not thinking about the appointment at the Washington, DC, clinic he’s not making it to.

There’s no moment when it clicks for him that he’s about to be stuck with a parasite anchored to his uterine lining, that the cells that will eventually become a heart are twitching in the first burgeonings of a pulse.

All he can think is that this is defector behavior. This is what he told Jess in the car last night. We kill you.

Aspen and Birdie and Luna don’t deserve this.

At the bottom of the stairs, the man who must be from another hive, a hunter from Virginia or rural Maryland, one of Levi’s buddies from the northern stretch of the mountains, does not move.

The door hangs open like a mouth. It lets in humid summer air and the sound of crickets, the distant rumble of late-night traffic from the highway two blocks west.

When this man speaks, he speaks with the hundred overlapping whispers of the hive:

“Come home.”

It’s been a while since a hive has had a real, honest-to-god defector.

At least, a defector Levi’s had to deal with.

According to Tammy, defectors used to be more common, but the way she sees it, there’s less to run toward these days.

Put on the news for literally five minutes; who wants to be a part of that?

Certainly not her, she said. She was fine staying right here, thank you.

But every so often, Levi gets a call to be on the lookout for certain plates, or some poor bastard or another, and he always says he will, even if it hasn’t panned out in a while.

The last time it did, it was a boy from Tennessee.

Right when Tammy stopped trying to convince Crane that moving in with Levi was a bad idea, when the apartment was still half-unpacked.

A hive mother a few hours outside Knoxville—some Southern hives have mothers , it’s tradition apparently—rang up Tammy, said to let her enforcer know they had a runner.

Tammy said we don’t got enforcers up here, but we do got a hunter. The hive mother said that’d do.

Lo and behold, Levi caught the guy passing through. Took out the lower leg with buckshot since it was the only ammunition he had on hand that day. Hoisted him up, wrapped up the wound in a garbage bag, and brought the boy home, like a friend who’d been out drinking too long.

Crane had woken up to the commotion, sliding out of their new shared bed (they hadn’t bought a used bed frame off Facebook Marketplace yet, so it was just a mattress on the floor) and plodding over to where Levi had dumped the delirious kid in the tub.

All Crane could think, even with a sobbing, shred-legged stranger taking up their new bathroom, was that this place was so shitty that maintenance had painted the porcelain, who does that, and the blood would fuck up the paint and never come out.

“You want him back?” Levi asked into his phone, jamming it between his cheek and shoulder so he could open a Bud Lite with both hands.

Crane hesitated in the doorway and Levi noticed, mouthed, Hey, baby .

“Dunno how picky your worms are,” he continued, “if they get territorial or whatever.”

“Worms,” the woman on the other side of the line groused. Her scratchy voice was audible through the phone speaker, a side effect of Levi’s combined affinity for shotguns and disregard for ear protection. “The lot of you are so disrespectful.”

“They’re worms ,” Levi snorted. “Tammy thought you wanted him back. Do you? Or can I shut him up?”

The Tennessee hive mother did not want him back. Levi shrugged, hung up, and started running the tap because driving this guy out into the wilderness to put him down would take too much time and waste expensive ammo. Plus, drowning makes the least mess.

“Help me with this,” Levi said as the defector—who couldn’t have been older than nineteen, Crane’s age then—started to clue into why, even through the fever of blood loss and pain, freezing water was hitting his cheek. “He’s got some fight in him.”

Crane doesn’t remember how the drowning went. What he does remember is burning muscles and the slip of hands against wet skin, and then stepping out of the tub and Levi shoving him hard against the bathroom wall.

The body was still warm in the water when Crane wiped away the face-fucked slurry of spit and cum that’d smeared down his chin, stained his shirt, left him coughing and crying.

“There we go,” Levi had said, scooping up the mess with two fingers and shoving it back into Crane’s mouth. “That’s a good boy.”

See? We kill you.