Page 12 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human

Eight

Early morning on the mountain, before the sun starts getting ideas. Wash County is all dark cliffs and zigzag roads and stars, insomniacs, and third-shifters at the lumberyard.

Crane started the drive chewing on a hangnail, and as he turns off Corridor H and into the gas station parking lot—when his swarm says home it means here—he’s worrying a bloody mess on his thumb.

The man with the worms under his skin hasn’t moved from the shotgun seat since they crossed state lines.

Crane can’t stop thinking about the burning-warm face pressed to his belly, gloves holding his hips the way Levi does when they’re fucking.

The CLOSED sign in the window is running out of battery. Only the emergency lights are on: one over the register, another by the dumpster.

And Levi’s there. Leaning against the truck with a Marlboro between two fingers, 12-gauge propped up against the back tire. Watching the Camry with the half-lidded predatory gaze he usually reserves for worm food.

The emergency lights catch the smoke trailing from his mouth, gives him a strange halo.

Crane parks halfway up the lot and kills the engine.

Right there. There’s the motherfucker who did this to him. That’s the man who came in him, whose cock knocked him up and put him here.

Does he know? He has to. Why else would he be here.

The man with the worms under his skin and the neck gaiter pulled up, unnaturally still, watches.

Crane is aware that all he needs to do is talk to the hive.

Get out of the car and walk into that dark back room and unravel himself.

He is such a good follower. He has enacted every order and given every piece of himself to this.

He is grateful for everything. I’m sorry , his expression will say, I should have come to you first. Please help me.

But his teeth are chattering.

He throws open the door and steps out into the gravel.

Levi pushes away from the truck, spreading his hands like Crane’s reaction to all this isn’t perfectly reasonable or, at the very least, hadn’t been telegraphed two years in advance. “So were you gonna just let me find the test in the trash or what?”

He takes the first step into range, and Crane yanks the pipe from the car frame and swings.

The problem is that Crane bought this pipe after Harry suggested he might have an easier time getting lug nuts off his tires with extra leverage, more length on the wrench, so it’s long and light and completely hollow.

If Crane had thought this through any, he could’ve gone for the actual lug wrench, or the still-bloody hammer wrapped up in his go bag, but all that is in the trunk and pregnancy brain, hormones, I’ll kill you , the panic nausea is creeping up his throat and he isn’t thinking right.

The first hit connects right at the cheekbone, makes a dull sound, and smacks the cigarette clean out of his mouth. Levi grunts, stumbles, slaps a hand over his cheek where a snag in the iron ripped the skin.

The second hit doesn’t land.

Levi bodies Crane against the back door. Smashes him against the car with his full weight. The pipe clangs against the gravel. “What the fuck— ”

Crane can’t fight his way out. Even with everything Levi taught him.

He’s so tired and Levi is so much stronger, and usually he’d twist this around as a fetish thing—what’s that one video he has bookmarked?

Merciless Male Domination , that—but Levi is actually really for-real hurting him, and yeah, most of the time he likes it but—

“Let go.”

Levi does. Instantly.

Crane collapses.

“He’s fine,” Levi says above him.

The man with the worms under his skin is there now, backlit and towering, taller than Levi and broader across the shoulders. Crane presses the heels of his hands into his eyes until they’re about to burst.

“He’s fine,” Levi’s saying, and “Wait, you—” and “Fuck, fuck.”

Crane knows he’s making some stupid animal noise, but he can’t stop, can’t make himself shut up.

“Look,” Levi says, “he’s fine. I didn’t hurt him, I didn’t hurt the baby. See? It’s fine.”

Crane crams his wrist into his mouth because if he doesn’t bite down, he’s going to scream. The red marks turn black like the perforated half-moon in the crook of Levi’s thumb.

Get me pregnant and I’ll kill you.

I’ll kill myself.

The man with the worms under his skin shoulders Levi out of the way and gets on the ground, puts himself on Crane’s level, and pulls him close. All Crane’s muscles are rigid. Curling him up like a bug. He’s hyperventilating and trying to get his fingers under the skin of his face to tear it off.

He should’ve set himself on fire. The swarm should’ve let him do it.

“Shh,” the man says, peeling nails away from skin. “Shh.”

It’s not a baby inside him. It’s barely not a blastocyst. According to the website he’d been looking at a few hours ago, a nine-week fetus (it can’t have been longer than nine weeks, it can’t ) is a wet insect, a grub waiting for a cocoon.

Crane can’t rip away his skin, so his hands flap helplessly, over and over.

The man doesn’t stop him. Just holds him.

You call it a baby only if you want it.

Back over at the truck, Levi’s got his shotgun. He makes it cough up all its shells and pockets them, one red cylinder after the other. The sharp glance he cuts at Crane is obvious. Levi’s not stupid. He remembered that night in the back seat. A sharp line of blood runs down his cheek.

“You almost done?” he calls, opening the Mossberg’s action with a menacing click for a final check before dropping it into the bed.

The tone is the same one Crane’s teachers used during the last meltdown he’d let himself have.

What had it been over, anyway. Something stupid.

A kid spilling tomato soup on Sophie’s leg in the lunch line.

“She’s acting like her foot got amputated,” the teacher on duty mumbled.

(Or maybe it’s the tone her first dentist took when he said, “We can’t handle this, ma’am,” and Mom held down her thrashing child, repeating, “Sorry, I’m so sorry. ” )

When Crane doesn’t respond, Levi comes over to the Camry, plucks the keys out of the ignition, and lets himself into the gas station.

“Shh,” the man says one more time.

Crane wants to be quiet. He wants to so bad. He’s being a child. Grow up. Stop. He fights for an ounce of composure and can’t get it. He’s going to be sick.

He doesn’t realize Levi’s back until Levi opens a bottle of water and pours half of it over Crane’s head.

Crane splutters at the sudden cold. His hair plasters to his face and his shirt is wet.

It’s wet. He wrestles it over his head and throws it because his clothes absolutely cannot under any condition be wet , it’s cold and it clings and it makes him want to scream.

Some of it’s splattered onto the man with the worms under his skin, and he doesn’t seem to care.

What is it like, not wanting to howl and sob when something doesn’t feel right.

Crane can’t imagine. Crane can’t think much of anything.

Levi says, “Are you done?”

Half-lucid and half-naked, gulping down air, Crane nods. Yes. He’s done. Just don’t do that again. Please.

So Levi leans against the Camry and casts his gaze toward Corridor H, scoping out his territory. Crane still is crying, but that’s acceptable. He can cry quietly.

In the lot—with stars slowly disappearing in the encroaching sunrise, Crane leaning all his weight onto the man with the worms under his skin—Crane tries as hard as he can but can’t recall anyone else in the hive getting pregnant.

At any hive, ever. Which is weird, because people have babies.

As a species, as a whole, it happens more often than not.

It seems like the sort of thing that’d get passed up through the grapevine, even if only via nasty rumors; Levi eating dinner over the sink and calling into the living room to ask if Crane heard about Samantha from outside Chattanooga, who left her kid in a hot car and killed him. Holy shit, what a dumb bitch.

Is Crane the first?

He can’t be. That’s not how probability, or birth rates, or the general human population works.

“I ain’t gonna ask where you were,” Levi says, “or why. This ugly bastard found you—” The man makes a displeased clicking sound reminiscent of a worm snapping its jaws. “And we’ve got bigger things to deal with, so. It’s water under the bridge. Okay?”

Aspen and Birdie and Luna are safe. Crane doesn’t believe in God but thank God. A drop of water falls from his hair onto his bare breast.

“Okay.” Levi replaces the cigarette Crane knocked out and fishes in his pocket for the lighter.

With the cut on his face slicing through the growing bruise, blood on the corner of his mouth, dog tags dangling down his chest, it’s almost lewd.

Crane focuses on the blood. He drew blood.

Fuck you. “Figured this was gonna be rough, but the pipe, that got me. Forgot you had that.”

He finds the lighter. Lights up.

Levi says, “Here’s how it’s going to work.

I’ve already gone through the apartment and locked up anything you could make a mess with.

Razors, scissors, knives, bleach—you want anything, you’re gonna have to ask me.

And you’re a smart son of a bitch, so we’ll have to keep an eye on you.

That’s why this motherfucker is here. We’re not taking any chances. ”

The man snorts scathingly.

“Speaking of.” Levi looks down at him. “You didn’t do anything to it, did you?”

No, of course he didn’t get the chance to scrape this thing out of him.

“Good.”

Good.

Why does Levi care? Why did he say it like that? Good.

Did Levi knock him up on purpose ?

That can’t be right. Crane is aware, vaguely, that there are men out there whose whole thing is getting trans guys pregnant.

They get off on it: putting a mutilated woman in her place.

Yeah, Levi’s an asshole, but he’s not like that .

He didn’t help Crane start T, but he never tried to stop him, either.

Sure, sometimes when they fuck, Levi calls him a bitch, or a slut, but that’s technically gender-neutral, if he ignores the time that good girl slipped out too, if he ignores how wet it made him.

Levi was the first person to make Crane feel like a man. This couldn’t have happened on purpose.

And now he’s really thinking about it. Cobbling together the future from books and movies and the pregnant women he looked away from when he passed them in the street.

His tits swelling with milk, his belly fat and heavy with a creature he’s only ever been able to conceive of as a literal chestburster.

He’ll have to push it out or cut it out.

It’s going to hurt. It’s going to eat him alive.

He’s hyperventilating again. Beating his face with his hands. If he caves his skull in this will stop , this will all be over, he won’t have to do this, please don’t make me do this, please just let me talk to the hive.

Levi says, “Shit.” Kneels on the ground and grabs Crane’s wrists tight. The man with the worms in his head holds Crane to his chest.

He can’t do this. He can’t he can’t he can’t.

“I know this is going to suck for you,” Levi says. His voice, right now, is the kindest it’s ever been. “But listen to me. I’m gonna make myself clear. Alright? The hive wants you to have this baby. You hear me? So you’re having this fucking baby.”

No, he’s not. This was a mistake. The hive will understand he can’t do this. It loves him, doesn’t it? It always has. He doesn’t want to die. It has to understand. It has to.

He tries to stand, reaching for the buzzing emergency light, but Levi gets him under the arms. “Nope,” he says, even as Crane sobs and struggles and his feet slip in the loose rocks. “We’re going home. You look like shit.”

Aspen: Crane?

Aspen: Are you taking a walk or something?

Aspen: We need to leave for the appointment in an hour.

Aspen: Birdie found your note. Are you okay? The door is fucked up.

Aspen: We’re not upset. If you need to talk something out I have the tablet. We’re not mad at you.

Birdie: I hate that I get it but I did the same thing with my parents when I was ur age.

I made the mistake and went back to them.

I know it sucks and its bad but I can put money on the fact that u went back because ur scared.

and we’re scared for u too and we’re not mad but please let us know you’re not dead in a ditch somewhere or smth. please?