Page 22 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human

“For your buddy,” Levi mutters. The way he says buddy is not very buddy at all, though a marked improvement from yesterday morning. “Thought he might be hungry.”

Stagger stalks over and unwraps a hunk of ugly organ meat. Some kind of liver, by the looks of it.

Crane raises an eyebrow in the shape of a question.

“Roadkill,” Levi offers. The closest thing either of them is going to get to an apology. “Thought we could get it broken down, but not much salvageable. Only decent part left.”

Stagger disappears into the kitchen to devour the organ over the kitchen sink. Out the open door, the outskirts of Washville are silent. Only a few late-night crickets, a few too-early birds.

Levi holds out the GPS on his phone. “Pick somewhere to eat.”

A second’s hesitation.

“Anywhere,” Levi huffs, annoyed he’s having to explain whatever kind gesture this is supposed to be. “I don’t give a shit. Pick and tell Tammy you’re headed out.”

It really sounded like he loved you. Fuck off.

The closest Taco Bell is a half-hour drive over the Maryland border, to the north; staying in West Virginia means going forty miles in the opposite direction, the ass end of the next county over.

Levi had been visibly surprised by Crane’s choice.

Not by the drive time, which he must have expected because there isn’t shit in Wash County, but by the selection itself.

“Didn’t think you liked that place,” Levi admits on the drive.

Crane grunts. The idea that Levi has retained any of his likes or dislikes borders on laughable, but it is a fair assessment.

Food is a nightmare. He’d eat the same thing every day if he could get away with it.

But it’s almost five in the morning, early enough that the twenty-four-hour restaurant hasn’t bothered to switch over to the breakfast menu, and the air doesn’t smell like afterbirth anymore, and Crane would be willing to commit a handful of petty crimes for a bag of shitty tacos.

Being pregnant—ugh, that fucking word , it has too many guttural sounds in it and the consonants are too deep in the throat—is just being hungry and nauseated simultaneously, all the time, constantly.

“Right.” When they arrive and step inside, Levi grabs his wallet as Stagger very clearly ignores the NO HOOD, NO FACE COVERING, WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE sign on the door. “What do you want.”

Crane snorts, give me a second , and leans on Levi’s arm to get a better look at the menu, like he’s slumping against Levi’s chest the way he used to after a long shift.

Behind the register, the trans girl with a bleached-burned pink ponytail and a Gundam tattoo on her wrist picks at her nails to avoid acknowledging them.

Probably so she doesn’t have to enforce the sign.

Her name tag has been covered with packing tape and now reads “Maude.”

Crane types his order into the Notes app, and Levi pays using the hard-earned money that the hive scams out of people up and down the mountain, and the three of them take over a booth in the back corner as the sun rises.

Stagger gets a single plain taco to pick at—no chance he’ll actually eat it, but that’s fine.

Crane doesn’t care. He has way too many tacos, and fruit punch, and the palate of a child.

He tears into his first bite and nearly swallows part of the wrapper in the process.

Crane and Levi used to do stuff like this all the time.

Levi would come back from a hunt exhausted, or he’d be smoking in the manager’s office while Crane cleaned up the blood trail.

All Levi had to do was drawl “Dinner?” and they’d end up in a cheap diner or sticky fast-food joint with as much grub as they could rustle up for twenty dollars, plus whatever quarters Crane could dig out of the cupholders.

It’s not like they had a lot to spare, the hive’s allowance covers rent and barely anything else, and Levi never tipped—if they went to Denny’s, Crane always had to fish around for a five-dollar bill to make up for it.

But it was nice. Levi drank his coffee black.

Crane put too much ranch on everything. They’d take turns drawing unflattering caricatures on napkins of other patrons there at three a.m., and make bets on Mike and Harry’s bullshit, wagering spare change or oral sex.

One time an errant text had proved Crane right immediately, and Levi ate him out in the back seat of the truck fifteen minutes later.

They hadn’t loved each other. They’d been rough and thoughtless.

Levi was a piece of shit who wouldn’t listen to a no if Crane had ever bothered to say it, and Crane had refused to make a decision about anything besides a tattoo in three years (and sometimes not even then; sometimes he let the artist pick). But it had been nice, almost.

“You’re twenty weeks now, right?” Levi says.

Crane shakes his head. Holds up ten fingers, then puts down a thumb for nine. Do the math.

“Close enough,” Levi admits, then, “Halfway there. And you’re okay?”

Still breathing. The best they’re going to get out of him.

“Hive asked how you were doing. I said being a fucking handful, but alive.” Levi snorts. Must’ve gone for a chat while Crane was at Tammy’s. “Not due to a lack of trying on your part.”

Crane glares. Stagger keeps an eye on them both but continues to pick at his taco; peeling lettuce and cheese from the meat, crunching the hard shell to give his hands something to do.

There’s no way Levi actually wants this.

Levi with his injured shoulder making it hard for him to lean back in the booth, wincing when he moves, surviving off violence the same way as a carnivorous animal.

Levi, the guy who looks like an extra from American Sniper or Zero Dark Thirty , who hasn’t said a kind word to a child the entire time he’s lived.

He’d make a terrible father too. He’d have to forcibly keep Crane alive every second of every day or let him go and take care of the baby himself.

He’d be miserable. The son of a bitch is already miserable now.

Across the booth, Levi rubs the bite mark on his wrist as he chews, and Crane has been spending too much time around Stagger, because the muscle in Levi’s jaw looks so much like a worm.

Crane pulls a napkin from the tray and mimes the act of writing.

Levi pats his pockets and comes up with the grease pencil he uses on the map he keeps in his truck—marking his hunting grounds to make sure he doesn’t bleed an area too dry, draw too much attention from the cops with too many missing person reports.

“Not accusing me of fucking anyone else, are you?” Levi says.

Crane flattens out the napkin and tries his best to draw.

The caricatures in the back of the Burger King or Denny’s were never good.

Sophie liked to consider herself an artist, spent her younger years filling notebook after notebook with doodles, but by high school she was too exhausted by advanced classes and community service clubs and college applications to keep up with it beyond the odd art elective.

Her main weakness had been line confidence, and it shows.

Crane’s drawing is sketchy and a bit of a mess. He blames it on the lackluster medium.

Still, it does the job. He nails Hannah’s braid, her tiny shoulders, the upturned nose that makes her look a bit like a pixie. After a spot of hesitation, sure, he adds the swell of her belly and exaggerates it to get the point across.

He slides it across the table.

Levi narrows his eyes, pulls the napkin closer. “Is that—huh. Hannah Baskin, McDowell hive. Right?”

Then, “She’s pregnant too?”

Crane starts to nod, then stops. Sucks on his teeth. Shrugs. She’s not anymore, if that’s what he’s asking.

“Christ.”

There it is again. The tic in his jaw. Looking like something is crawling underneath him, working its way into the spaces between the skin and the muscle and the bone where it doesn’t belong.

Crane can imagine what the hive said to Levi when he walked into the gas station at some point during the past few hours—the ex-soldier furious and seething, stumbling into the office of his superior officer, fired up and needing a direction in which to explode, only to be told to be calm and quiet and still.

You touch the carrier of our little one, they must have said, and we will devour you alive.

If Levi actually intended on apologizing, he’d give Crane what he wants.

Fuck pregnancy cravings and half-hearted restitution, whatever this trip was.

Push him hard into the wall. Shove fingers down his throat until he gags.

Buckle a belt around his neck and fasten it way too tight.

Let him be a man and take something. He doesn’t care what. Just let him take it.

But he’s no different from Hannah, is he.

They finish their food in silence. Crane is somehow angrier than he’d been twenty-four hours ago, and a hundred times more exhausted.