Page 20 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human

Fourteen

The bag in Crane’s hand weighs as much as a ten-dollar grocery run.

A package of good cookies, or a discounted tray of nearly expired chicken thighs.

On the back porch, he stands as still as he can to feel if the thing inside is moving.

The plastic flutters when he breathes, so he stops until his lungs burn.

Nothing. Whatever it was, it was born dead. Not even a twitch or gurgle to show for it.

Jess and Tammy didn’t react like anything about it was strange, but. That can’t be right. He casts around mentally for an explanation and can only come up with shock, the same way he did on Aspen and Birdie’s porch. It’s his go-to. Shock can explain just about anything.

“Um,” Jess says, shoulders hunched as Stagger steps out of the shed with a shovel. Crane lowers the bag and loops his fingers through the rabbit-ear handles to hold it normally. “The woods? Away from the house?”

It’s late afternoon, balmy with a pleasant breeze smelling like tall grass, the faint scent of the honeysuckle crawling up the rotting back steps.

Still holding the bag, because it’s hard to forget about the bag, Crane peels a powder-yellow flower from the vine, plucks out the stamen, and places the single bead of nectar on his tongue.

Ever since he was a kid, he’s had the intense urge to eat the flower whole.

He’d never done it, but he got the sense that the petals would crunch and squeak between his teeth like fetal cartilage.

Then, realizing he’s been asked a question, he nods. Away from the house. Don’t need anybody asking questions, not with a murder weapon buried in the garden.

Jess says, looking at the bag, “Poor thing.”

He hears Hannah crying inside, Tammy talking her through passing the placenta. Time to go.

Stagger sticks close as a burr. Even with the gaiter pulled back over his nose, the entirety of his body keeps shifting and readjusting under the skin. His eyes dart between Crane, the bag, Jess, then back again. Crane tries to get his attention, but it won’t stay in one place.

Well. They can’t be doing anything wrong. If they weren’t supposed to be doing this, he’s pretty sure Stagger would’ve stopped them.

Again, Crane one-handed signs, What?

“Little one,” he says again.

Jess cringes involuntarily at the sound of his worm-chatter voice. “Oh my god.”

Unfortunately, it’s a nice enough afternoon that people are out. Crane hasn’t made a habit of getting to know Washville’s few remaining inhabitants. Why would he. The people here are good people, trying to eke out a few more mortgage payments or insurance copays, and Crane is—well, Crane.

Not that it’s hard to recognize people. With so few residents, you learn faces eventually.

An old man with nine fingers who comes by the gas station every now and again and pays with change; a group of kids from the next town over buying beer every weekend because they’ve been banned from the local spots.

There’s a lady at the Dollar General who started smiling at Crane last year and never stopped.

He keeps his distance, though. He’s mentally incapable of maintaining two halfway-decent relationships at a time.

A ways down Victory Lane, a woman on her porch raises a hand in greeting.

“Jessie girl,” she calls, rough from what must be decades of smoking. “Them boys ain’t giving you trouble, are they?”

If it were up to Crane, he’d keep going, but Jess stops, so he stops too—on the side of the road, because there’re no sidewalks up here—and Jess breaks into the biggest, most sunbeam-bright smile.

“Hi, Miss Addie!” she says. “No, ma’am, not at all. These are my coworkers. We were just helping Miss Tammy around the house.”

Miss Addie pulls down her bifocals to inspect Crane and Stagger, thankfully with enough distance between them that Crane can pull at his shirt and Stagger can duck his head and they won’t look too wrong.

She seems to at least recognize Crane, because she says, “When did you start working at the gas station?”

“Few months ago. Sean wasn’t too happy when I got the job, so Miss Tammy’s letting me stay with her is all.”

Miss Addie hums. “I ain’t seen him around.”

“Huh. Not missing much.”

Miss Addie says, “You look better for it, sugar, that’s all I’ll say,” and tells the lot of them to get on with their errands then. Jess laughs. It’s bright and genuine and sweet.

Sophie smiled too, sure, but she hated to show her teeth. Her favorite pictures of herself caught only a suggestion of her; the back of her head, face obscured by long hair, turned from the camera like a ghost.

Five minutes past the tree line into the woods, Jess stops in front of a tree, looks down into the gap in the roots of an old oak, and says, “Here.”

Stagger jams the shovel into the dirt and begins to dig.

Crane, then, is left holding the bag.

He’s sat himself in the underbrush because he’s tired and his feet hurt.

Everything is a goddamn pregnancy symptom these days.

Don’t get him started on how often he has to piss now, the uterus pushing itself right into his bladder.

It doesn’t feel right to put the bag on the ground, so it’s in his lap.

The bag is translucent, but all he can make out is the off-white dish towel wrapping up the miniature corpse.

His long fingers—chewed-on nails with clinging specks of polish, cut-up knuckles—pick at the flimsy knot holding the package closed.

The same way they used to pick at his scalp or press nervously against the edge of a knife. Autonomously, without his consent.

He could just ask Tammy what it looked like when they get back.

Or Jess even, right now. The pregnancy tracker online likes to show a perfect tiny baby, if not uncomfortably spindly, so he has to go to medical photos to get an honest depiction—at this stage, a real baby would be an eerie translucent red with swollen eye sockets and nub-fingers.

Unsettling, a growing bird taken out of the egg too soon.

Stagger jams the shovel through a root, pries away a rock. Jess asks him, “So do you have a name, or?” and he doesn’t reply.

The bag comes undone.

Crane pushes aside the plastic flaps, skimming the dish towel shroud.

There has to be a difference between babies and whatever grows inside people like him and Hannah. Whatever the worms could possibly want so badly as to remove Tammy from her duty, to do this to him on purpose, to force into existence the first children any hive has seen in decades.

“No wonder you and Crane get on,” Jess says. A talker when she’s nervous. “You’re so quiet.”

Stagger grunts at her, which, much like Crane’s own attempts at communication, gets the point across nonetheless.

Crane lifts the dish towel.

It’s…

A baby.

Tiny and curled in on itself, head the size of a billiard ball, bones the size of toothpicks.

Squinched pug face. Skin almost see-through but not quite, thin enough to show the organs under paper-thin flesh.

And a distended belly, from which hangs a bizarrely swollen string, stained blue and white; a deep-sea creature clamped to its stomach.

It’s not a larva, or a giant maggot.

Just a baby.

It’s only one, one fucking week older than what’s inside him. What he’s carrying is a few ounces lighter, the skin closer to transparent than translucent. He leans in, tries to make out the details. All the tiny pieces of it.

Though, what if it’s like Stagger? The worms hiding between the tiny organs. Bugs instead of capillaries. Everything is too small to tell with the wrinkly, half-formed skin in the way.

It can’t be normal. It can’t be.

Crane reaches into the bag and props up the sad little creature with one hand. It’s warm and uncomfortably soft. Floppy, too. If he pressed his fingers into the cartilage that would have eventually solidified into a rib cage, the same way he’d open an orange, it’d just come apart.

He deserves to know what’s inside him, doesn’t he? It’s the least the hive can give him. A goddamn answer.

He gets his second hand in there and nudges apart the puffy eyelids, then its tiny slit-mouth. Nothing surprising. Only gelatinous eyeballs not yet finished forming, and structures that would have become gums.

Fine. He can’t see the worms through Stagger’s eyes or mouth either. He’s putting his thumbs against the itty-bitty breastbone.

The nail pierces the skin.

Jess shrieks “ Crane! ” with the panicked shrill of someone catching their dog with a mauled animal and snatches the bag. Stagger’s head snaps up with a snarl. “What the fuck are you doing ?”

Crane doesn’t try to get the bag back, or make a noise in protest, or do anything at all.

Even if he spoke, every possible response would make him sound deranged.

I was going to open it up and look for worms?

That is involuntary-hold levels of bullshit, even with the hive’s sky-high tolerance for deranged behavior.

Like, that’s the sort of thing Harry would’ve said before Levi put him down.

But he wants to beg her to give it back. If he opens it up, he can see. He’ll know what’s waiting for him at the end of this. Who cares, anyway? Hannah doesn’t want it, and it can’t feel anything. It’s dead. It won’t care and neither should she.

Jess stares at him. Waiting.

She gets nothing.

Jess says, “Jesus Christ.” Her teeth chatter. “I don’t—oh my god. What is—” She turns to Stagger. “Move. I’ll bury it.”

Stagger steps away, almost gratefully abandoning the project to return to Crane’s side.

Jess doesn’t take the shovel. She gets to her knees in the rotting underbrush and places the bag in between the roots of the tree and scoops the soil back in with her hands.

Mud from the rain and smears of dirt cake under her nails.

“I know you don’t like me,” she says.

Stagger puts a hand into the overgrown hair at the back of Crane’s neck.

“I’m not stupid. Believe it or not.”

Crane glances uncomfortably over his shoulder back to Washville. It sounds like she’s going to cry.

The best part about being a mute is that he doesn’t have to respond to stuff like this. He could really play up his autist status today too, if he wanted. Just get up and leave.

“And, like, I get it. That’s fine. I fucked up that night and—” She packs a handful of dirt around the flimsy bag.

The stillborn disappears under bugs and innocent earthworms. “I know I’m a giant baby, and I’m annoying, and I can’t take care of myself, I know, believe me.

Sean told me all the fucking time. I am fully aware of my flaws. ”

Well. Crane hasn’t even been around her enough to make value judgments like that. Sure, she did fuck up, and then she snitched about it, and she’s anxious about the register and bad enough at math that he keeps having to recount the cash drawer. But that’s not why he dislikes her. Not really.

(It should’ve been her.)

The final handful of dirt goes down. Jess shoves her weight on top of it once, twice, to tamp down the musty earth.

“I don’t know.” She’s sniffling now. “At least I’m grateful, right?

Sean’s dead. I have my first job. You know this is my first?

And when I showed up at your gas station, it was the first time I’d been outside in weeks.

I’m not even from here. I’m from Cleveland.

I thought I was going to die in that stupid fucking cabin.

I prayed every night that he’d change his mind and see that what he was doing was wrong and he’d let me out and I could just. I could see the sun again.

” She gets up. She’s unsteady on her feet.

“Turns out, after everything, it sucks outside that cabin too.”

When she smiles again, it doesn’t reach her eyes.

“Why would you care, though. Swear to god, all of you like it here.”