Page 18 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human

Thirteen

No car keys means walking. That’s fine. It’s a good day for it.

Tammy lives in Washville proper, tucked against the woods in a ranch house some two decades older than she is.

Used to be that Harry would come by every week; cut the grass, hack down the ivy, do the things Tammy can’t with her hands so bad and her husband dead.

Then he died too, so Crane picked up the slack.

Then Crane got knocked up and nobody wants him doing hard work, so now Jess is doing it.

Last time Levi and Crane swung by, she was in the yard with gloves, yanking grass out of cracks in the concrete walkway.

For a better part of the twenty minutes down the side of the highway to town, Stagger grumbles about Crane’s stunt in the apartment.

Crane waves him off—he’s distracted, burning with adrenaline, repeating over and over there’s another one, there’s another one?

—but Stagger won’t let it go. The worms won’t stay still.

They need to work on their signing. The only thing Crane can manage is okay. The sign for O , the sign for K. Okay. It’s okay. He’s in one piece, okay? Drop it.

God, he hopes Levi makes him pay for it later.

Washville itself is a collection of shops and old stores branching out from an ill-maintained Main Street, and Crane will absolutely not be seen on its sidewalks during the day. Together, he and Stagger skirt around town and find the gravel residential roads behind the dialysis clinic.

There’s a charm to it, living at such a high elevation that the world looks flat and empty forever.

Wide clear skies, shoddy yards pitted with puddles, piles of firewood, guesstimated property lines marked by differing grass heights.

There’re deer tracks in the mud, and a cat at the base of a pine with knobby-knee roots.

Crane likes it here. Hard to believe that he could like something that isn’t imminently self-destructive, but whatever.

He likes how the cliffs light up orange and red every autumn, and the way fog clings to the treetops.

He also likes to think he would’ve moved up here even if the swarm hadn’t found him.

He can’t say that for certain, but it’s nice to imagine.

Finally, the two of them spot 636 Victory Lane slouching alone halfway down the road. Crane doesn’t recognize the car in the driveway. He’s homesick as he takes the steps two at a time and knocks.

“ Get that ,” Tammy demands, muffled, and Jess does as she’s told.

Shit. He thought Jess was working today.

Jess hesitates in the doorway, smelling earthy and wet, wound-like. The same thing he’s been smelling since Levi got home. Wearing Tammy’s hand-me-downs and scabs on her knees.

She says, visibly uncomfortable, “Both of you?”

“Is that Crane?” Tammy calls from the other side of the house.

She calls back: “Yeah. Him and the, uh, other guy.” Then, quieter, “Look, can your friend stay outside? In the backyard or something?”

Crane shoulders past her and clicks his tongue for Stagger to follow.

Tammy’s house is a comfort. Ugly vinyl floors, wood walls, lace curtains, and ancient white appliances.

There is one air-conditioning unit, and it’s jammed crookedly into the living room window.

Crane used to fall asleep on the brown couch watching World War I documentaries, read the angry letters Tammy’s daughter sent in the mail every few months after pulling them from the trash, dig freezer-burned ice cream out from behind mounds of stockpiled venison.

Maybe he should’ve taken Tammy up on the option to move back in. He’d have to share the space with Jess, but he can grit his teeth through a lot.

Jess, left with no other option, considering she’d just been completely ignored, shuts the door. “The girl is in the back.”

A pained sound groans from one of the rooms. Crane’s blood goes cold. The last time he heard something like that was when he found a deer with a broken neck on the side of the road. Stagger pulls down his neck gaiter. His nostrils flare. The entire house reeks of injured human.

Tammy bustles out of the hall with arms full of dirty towels.

“Good.” She dumps the towels into Jess’s arms. “Throw these in the wash and bring new ones. You—” Pointing at Stagger. “Stay in the living room. She’s scared enough as it is.” Stagger gives a low whine, but even the worms won’t contradict an Appalachian granny. “And Crane, with me.”

Tammy turns on her heel and leads him to the spare bedroom. Crane’s mind turns, turns, turns, sorts through every movie he’s watched and book he’s read to prepare himself for what might be on the other side of the threshold.

It fails.

The girl kneeling by the bed, face pressed to the sheets—sweat-soaked, shivering, dress rucked up to her thighs—is a fucking child.

Watery blue eyes. Hair so blonde it’s almost white. Legs stained and hands clasped like she’s praying.

Crane stops short in the doorway.

Tammy whisks past him, rustling the plastic sheet she’s set over the carpet. (With the amount of blood they deal with, that kind of sheet is standard issue for hive households.) The smell is thicker here, heavier. He can taste it in the back of his throat.

“Head up, girl,” Tammy says, taking her by the nape of the neck. “Show me you’re still breathing.”

“It hurts,” the girl whimpers.

“I know. Contractions hurt.”

“It’s too soon.”

“I know,” Tammy says again.

She’s eighteen at most, though he’d guess lower if he had the capacity to mentally withstand the implications of it. Her belly shows through her dress, barely. Certainly not big enough for this to be anything but a tragedy.

“I don’t want a man in here,” the girl says. “Tell him to go away.”

Tammy shakes her head. “He’s a good one. Ain’t gonna hurt you. And look. Look at him. He got himself pregnant, too. Breathe , baby. See? Look at his belly.”

Crane grits his teeth—silver lining, he passes for male to a terrified little girl—and ducks back out to the kitchen to grab a bottle of water before returning.

Bottles of water are apparently how the hive shows affection, or care, or worry.

Crane prefers it to speaking. Her hands shake when she tries to drink, so Crane holds it to her lips.

She has faint freckles across her nose. She’s striking.

So tiny too. He’s never been to McDowell, but he thinks he would’ve heard of her at some point, the distant murmuring of a dozen hive workers about a beautiful thing hiding in a West Virginia impound lot.

Or maybe he doesn’t pay attention and nobody tells him anything.

She coughs, swallows.

Reaches for his belly.

Says, “Wait.” Says, “Crane?”

Crane blinks.

“Levi told me about you.” Her voice cracks. The pads of her fingers press against his stomach, right where his shirt goes taut. “You look—just like he said you do.”

Levi talks about him?

That can’t be right. There’s nothing to talk about.

Their relationship barely counted as a relationship, even before all this.

The sex was good, the rent is halved, there’s always someone to leave dinner on the stove or help pull a body out of the trunk.

Levi made Crane feel like a man and Crane made Levi feel like a man.

That doesn’t count as anything to talk about, to him.

Crane catches Tammy’s attention and pulls a face. A request for context, and a change of subject, if she doesn’t mind.

“This is Hannah. Showed up a few hours ago,” Tammy says.

She picks up a notepad by the side of the bed, checks her watch, jots down the time.

“Stole a car from the impound lot and drove up herself. In labor the whole time. Figured I was her best bet.” She glances over.

“You said nobody at McDowell knew? Not even the hive?”

Hannah whispers, “I thought Beth’d be mad.”

Beth. The old bitch who runs the impound lot. Hannah must’ve been layering on the sweatshirts and sucking in her stomach hard to get through it. And if even the McDowell hive had no idea? Jesus.

“You probably thought right,” Tammy mutters. “Given she called me a minute ago to ask if I’d seen hide or hair of you.”

Hannah looks up in a panic.

“I didn’t tell her. You got enough to deal with right now.” Tammy kneels with a groan, carefully wiping down the girl’s shaking thighs with a warm washcloth. “Though now that I’m thinking about it. Who was it? Was it Billy?”

Hannah moans a weak “No,” and thank god. Crane’s never met Billy, but from Levi’s stories, the guy’s a piece of work. A retired hunter pushing fifty, the kind of man Levi keeps having to push around. He sounds like the type.

“Then who’s the daddy?”

No response. Hannah squeezes her eyes shut, blows out hard through her teeth.

“Because if you didn’t want this, we can tell Levi. You give us a name, we’ll see if we can’t get his man”—Tammy nods to Crane—“to take care of the bastard.”

“No,” Hannah says. “No.”

Tammy stays there for a moment in silence, then says, “You change your mind, you tell us. We’ll handle it.”

According to Tammy, Hannah is approximately twenty weeks pregnant; if they go with that number, she’s a single week further along than Crane is.

Also according to Tammy, being born at twenty weeks is a death sentence.

It barely counts as a stillborn at this point.

Late-term miscarriage , that’s what she says.

Crane has never been more jealous in his life.

Jess returns with fresh towels and takes to braiding Hannah’s hair while Tammy checks dilation, dictating her notes to Crane. But that doesn’t last forever. Labor takes a long time. It’s a slow, painful slog. Most of the time there’s nothing to do except be there with her, and Crane is bad at that.