Page 17 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human

Twelve

Tammy asks Crane yes-or-no questions in the apartment living room.

She feels his stomach and he answers each question with a nod.

Yes, he’s having trouble buttoning his pants.

Yes, he’s hungry, which is good because it means the morning sickness is finally cutting him a break, though the dizziness sucks.

And yes, dear god, his breasts ache, and the larva is stealing calcium from his bones to build its own, and stripping the oxygen from his blood and pissing into the amniotic fluid. It’s disgusting. Yes. That’s correct.

In the same vein, Tammy hesitates to divulge details.

Probably debating if she should tell him how big the larva is, or what parts of it are starting to form.

He imagines its tiny maggot segments are building up from stolen nutrients.

She focuses on the important things instead, like how he should be stocking up on liners and extra underwear and drinking more water.

For the love of god, put on some weight, and accept he’ll go up a cup size. Go get a new bra.

“We’d probably be able to tell the sex,” she says. “If we were going to a hospital.”

“No fucking hospitals,” Levi says, loading his backpack with hunting supplies.

“I ain’t talking to you.”

Nineteen weeks, she declares.

It’s a countdown. Twenty-one weeks left, or thereabouts.

The next morning, right before Levi is supposed to return from his hunting trip to Maryland, Crane stares into the only full-length mirror in the apartment, hung sloppily on the back of the bathroom door.

He’s showing.

He holds the hem of his shirt in his mouth, the drawstrings of his pajama pants undone so he can take in the full size of the bump.

It’s not even that big of a belly. A vague rounding of the stomach and not much more.

But it’s big enough that he can’t pass it off as an unfortunate fat deposit—it’s breaking the silhouette of his baggy shirts, shuffling around his organs to make room for itself.

He runs a hand over it. It’s softer than he thought it’d be.

Only hair and skin, bulging out under the rib cage and distorting the tattoos.

He considers the possibility that it’s not one giant grub.

Maybe it’s a mass of them, the way an animal left to rot in the sun swells to bursting with parasites.

Stagger looms in the cramped hallway, as he does.

Crane signs, What? He does it one-handed because it still gets the point across.

It takes a second for Stagger to recognize it—they haven’t had a lot of time to practice their rudimentary ASL, what with Crane picking up extra shifts.

If he’s too tired to think, then he won’t think about how much he wants to die.

“Hurt?”

Not really. Besides the typical pregnancy aches. That’s not why he’s upset. Come on, buddy, use your worm-infested brain.

Crane takes off his shirt, then the deodorant-stained racerback bra he’s worn every day for a year, and turns on the hall light.

“Big lights” are usually a hard no in the apartment.

This one still has its lightbulb, only because he can’t figure out how to remove it.

But, see? Look at the belly. Look how big it’s gotten.

And, with an overhead light, his tits now cast a shadow across the rib cage. He can grab a handful. That’s more than he could do before. A few weeks ago, there was barely enough for Levi to get into his mouth.

Twenty months of testosterone isn’t magic.

When he hums, the sound rattles at the base of his throat, not quite hitting the low note he hopes for.

He’s hairy like a tenth-grade boy and sports a thin, patchy struggle of a beard.

But it’d done the job well enough. He’s tall, and wears Levi’s old shirts more often than not, and truckers and hive-bitten strangers passing through have stopped flirting and started calling him kid , or boy , or just hey, man if they’re cool like that.

Most importantly, he’d stopped seeing Sophie.

Crane really, really looks in the mirror. Presses his chest flat. Sucks his stomach in.

Sophie is supposed to be gone. She’s supposed to be dead, he swears, but now there’s something in his stomach and it’s growing and it’s going to come out and he thinks the first time someone calls him a mother he’s going to hit his head against a wall until his skull splits.

He’s going to pray for an umbilical cord wrapped around its thick grub neck.

If he’s going to look down one day and see a maggot chewing on his nipple for milk, he might as well take out his own eyes, right?

His distress must be visible. “Shh,” Stagger murmurs.

Crane mimics him: “Shh.” And again. “Shhh.”

It’s supposed to help. Something about the vagus nerve, he thinks. There we go. Easy now.

In the awkward alcove of the hallway, tucked between the closet and the bathroom door, it’s okay.

He wants to find whatever worm makes up Stagger’s jugular, or carotid artery, and press his forehead against it so he can feel it the way he feels for Tammy’s pulse.

Align their heartbeats, or whatever passes for a heartbeat in Stagger’s body, if he has one, because Crane can’t control his pulse on his own.

A little kid incapable of regulating emotions without Mommy.

The moment before Crane reaches for him, because god he wants to stop feeling like this, the apartment door whines open and slams shut. Something heavy hits the hardwood.

Crane pulls away quick.

“ Crane . You here?” Levi’s footsteps thump into the kitchen. Cabinets bang one after another. What kind of question is that—where else would he be? “First aid kit. Where’d you put it.”

Crane wrestles on his bra and shirt, snatches the kit from the linen closet, and finds Levi in the kitchen, opening a beer with one hand and clutching a wadded-up towel to his shoulder with the other.

“He had a buddy,” Levi says, half turning and dropping the towel to show the murder scene swallowing the left side of his back. “Caught me off guard. Hurts like a bitch.”

Fuck. Levi’s shoulder is black with blood.

How long has he been walking around like this?

The whole drive back down from Maryland, feeding the hive, everything?

Crane kicks over a stool from the shitty dining table they don’t use—jabs his finger at it, sit —and goes for the kitchen shears to get the shirt off before remembering they were confiscated two months ago.

Fine. He peels up a torn edge of fabric from the wound and rips it until he can toss the whole mess on the floor.

Levi hisses. “I liked that shirt.”

Too late. There’s a perfect four-inch line across the shoulder blade smelling like pennies.

Crane washes his hands, because Levi ending up with an infection isn’t high on the list of things he wants to deal with, shooting a pointed glare across the kitchen. Levi sniffs morosely.

“I didn’t see him, okay? Sue me.” Then: “Hey.” Stagger’s lurking by the fridge. “Forgot to save a piece for you. Little busy.”

Stagger huffs, but Crane shoots him a look too. They can have one of their weird macho stare-downs later, thank you.

Cleaning a wound sucks. It’d be easier in the bathroom, but the room is tiny; easier to avoid staining the grout in the first place than attempt to get down there and scrub it.

Bad enough in there as it is. Crane spreads a plastic sheet across the kitchen floor to catch the splatter, but the leaky dribble of homemade saline and diluted blood gets everywhere anyway.

At least the wound isn’t visibly dirty. Only a few stray towel fibers.

God. The fibers look like the tiny white worms he’d find while helping Birdie with the garden. He plucks one out with tweezers and holds it up to double-check.

Just linen.

The wound’s too big for butterfly bandages—doesn’t look like it scraped the bone, but it definitely went through all the skin and hit the muscle—and absolutely will not hold with superglue, so stitches it is.

Levi winces into his beer but takes it like a champ.

Push the needle through the skin, drag the thread through, pull it taut.

Leaving bloody fingerprints across Levi’s bare back, Crane seethes.

Levi hasn’t even tried to help. It’d be stupid to expect Levi to be fully on his side; Levi is always going to put the hive first. That’s part of the deal. Crane would put the hive over Levi, too. But nothing ?

It’s not like he wants sappy, saccharine reassurance.

If anyone offered soft-boy of-course-I-still-see-you-as-a-man platitudes, spouted “trans men are men” validity circle-jerk shit, or showed him seahorse dad memes, he’d gag.

It’s that, okay, look, the hottest thing Levi’d ever done to him was shove his head down on his cock so hard he’d nearly vomited, and all Levi said was, “Come on. Thought you’d take it like a man. ”

Crane yanks one of the stitches too hard. Levi grunts into his beer.

The least Levi could do is that. Give Crane something to take. But Levi hasn’t hurt him since that night in the parking lot. Hasn’t pushed him to the ground or left a bruise, not with Stagger breathing down their necks.

What it would take to change that.

Push, drag, pull.

He thinks about Levi ducking his head to Jess’s shoulder. Her dark hair and thin lips and big eyes.

It’s a stretch. It’s a low blow. It’s nonsense.

It’s perfect.

He stitches the last inch, ties off the thread, and cuts it with his teeth because he doesn’t know where the scissors are anymore.

And as soon as the needle is back in the first aid kit, he brings his fist down onto the line of sloppy sutures holding Levi’s newest hole closed.

Levi choke-screams, “ Fuck .” The only kind of thing you can get out when your vision’s gone white at the edges. He rockets off the stool like he’s been shot and keels around, grabbing for him uselessly.

In an instant, Stagger bullies into the kitchen. The ever-present protector, of course. Can’t let a little domestic dispute go unchallenged. He jams himself between Crane and Levi with that deep-chest snarl, puts an arm out, ducks his head like some big buck in the snow.

Crane is grinning, though. He can feel the blood in his veins again.

“The fuck is wrong with— fuck .” Levi hunches over, clutches his shoulder, struggles to get his breath. He’s glassy-eyed, feet planted in the pink soap-water smearing the kitchen floor. Still holding the beer too, dangling by the bottleneck from his fingers.

He points the bottle at Stagger. “You. Move.”

Crane wouldn’t mind if Stagger did—let’s refresh some bruises tonight—but he doesn’t, and that sets Levi off too.

What, you think you knocked him up, big motherfucker you think you are.

That sort of thing. It’s been a while since he’s gotten to see the good stuff. Crane hadn’t realized he’d missed it.

“Get out of the way,” Levi snarls, then, “Look at me, the fuck’s gotten into you? Look at me .”

Oh, he’ll let Levi know. That’s no problem. He grabs a notepad from the counter and a pen, the same notepad and pen they use for the grocery lists, and writes in big, scrawling letters.

ARE YOU FUCKING JESS

Levi stares at the sentence like there’s a chance he’s misreading four of the simplest words in the English language.

“Am I—”

He laughs. It sounds like a bark.

“It’s the hormones,” Levi says. He looks to Stagger as if bro code supersedes the past fifteen seconds, you seeing this? Stagger doesn’t catch on because he is a bunch of worms stuffed into a human body. “Holy shit, they really do make you crazy.”

Stagger identifies the note as a source of tension and crumples it.

“Is this because I didn’t take her on the hunt today?

Special treatment? ” Levi’s showing all his big predator teeth and Stagger is getting pissed and, you know what, Crane hadn’t thought of that, but sure!

After everything Mike and Levi put him through during his first months with the hive, this is absolutely because he didn’t take Jess on the hunt today, one hundred percent.

“You think I wanna babysit some little girl again? Shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck— ”

Crane’s phone rings.

It gets real quiet in the kitchen real fast.

He’d completely forgotten that the damn thing was in his pocket. It still has the janky default ringtone too, because nobody ever calls him.

Both Stagger and Levi watch him—always watching, the kind of cruel and unusual punishment watching that would violate the Geneva Convention if he was a prisoner of war—as he pulls the phone out and checks the caller ID.

He tilts the screen. Tammy.

Levi snaps, “Answer it.”

He does. Through the haze of his pounding head, he remembers to click his tongue twice to acknowledge that yes, he has in fact picked up.

“Hey, sweetheart,” Tammy says. “Sorry about the call, I know how much you hate these things. Just wanted to let you know we got something interesting down at the house you might wanna see, if you can keep your mouth shut.”

Tammy snorts dryly at her own joke.

“Anyway. The little girl from the McDowell hive’s here. Pregnant, but won’t be for much longer. Could use an extra hand with the mess.”

Crane is halfway out the door by the time she’s done with the last sentence, Stagger pausing only for a moment to grab his gaiter and gloves before trailing behind. Levi only yells a little.