Page 25 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human

Seventeen

Get up.” Levi grabs Crane by the back of the shirt and drags him onto his feet. “Start walking.” He nudges the shotgun toward Stagger. “And you too.”

Outside, Levi waits impatiently while Crane locks up the gas station—“Jesus,” he mutters because Crane can’t find the right key with his hands shaking so bad, his vision so blurred with tears—then pushes him toward the truck. Crane stumbles.

Stagger growls.

“You want to fucking start?” Levi yanks the pump action. The Mossberg makes an animalistic chuck-chuck as it cycles a round into the chamber. “We can do this right here.”

Crane catches Stagger’s gaze. Shakes his head ever so slightly.

Don’t. Not now.

Stagger’s nostrils flare, but he acquiesces. Ducks his head in understanding.

“S’what I thought.” He yanks open the F-150’s passenger door and shoves Crane against the seat, standing to block the only way out. In the dim light from the gas station pumps, sweat gleams across his flushed throat. Muscles stand out hard on the side of his neck. “Give me your phone.”

His phone? His phone. That has all the texts from Aspen and Birdie on it.

Levi snaps twice. “ Phone .”

It’s fine, Crane tells himself. Levi doesn’t know the passcode. There’s no reason for Levi to think there’s anyone else involved.

He fumbles it out of his pocket and hands it over.

“Good.” Levi nudges Crane into the seat, slams the door, and comes around to the driver’s side.

Stagger takes the back. Crane turns to see him, resists the urge to reach between the seats to hold his wrist and feel the worms, the closest thing Stagger has to a pulse.

Or, actually, he doesn’t know if Stagger has a pulse.

He’s never felt it. He should have checked on the floor of the office, should have pressed his ear to his chest to see if that heart is still beating under there.

If he is a puppeteered corpse or something else entirely.

The apartment is too dark and too warm. Nothing’s been cleaned in weeks because Crane is the only one who bothers and he’s barely been able to put food in the microwave these days, let alone do dishes or wash the sink or pick up literally anything.

The upstairs neighbors, the only neighbors they have since the family in 202 got an eviction notice last month, play music loud enough that Crane can make out the lyrics.

Levi bolts the front door.

“Sit,” he says.

Sitting makes Crane nervous. His limbs don’t want to work. He makes it to the couch anyway and his knees give out.

Stagger stands beside him, a big gloved hand opening, closing, opening, closing.

“New ground rules,” Levi says, twisting a combination into the big black gun safe next to the door. “These have already been discussed and approved, so there will be no debate. Show me you understand.”

Through the haze, Crane nods.

“First one is for you.” Levi juts his chin at Stagger as he puts the shotgun up and bangs the safe closed. “Your job is to enforce these rules. If at any point I decide you’re not useful enough, I have full clearance to let the hive know, and then I’ll be able to do my job.”

Stagger does not respond. His hand just keeps opening, closing.

Crane tries not to think about the muzzle of the gun touching the side of Harry’s head, the half second of silence as Harry realized what was happening, the deafening boom and the hiss of blood and brain matter hitting the ground before the body did.

Crane spent enough time cleaning that up.

He’s not sure he could handle it if it was Stagger all over the floor, all the severed worm pieces he’d have to scrape out of the pits in the concrete.

“Then,” Levi continues, “you.” Looking at Crane now. “You are no longer allowed to leave the apartment without explicit permission from me, and you must be under direct supervision twenty-four seven. This includes the gas station. You’re being relieved of all shifts.”

Crane can’t feel his hands. What? No. Levi can’t trap him here like this, he can’t—

“We’ll be reducing hours, day shift only.

The girls can handle it. No more difficult than what you’ve been doing for the past few months.

” Levi sniffs. “You need anything, I’ll get it for you.

You feel anything change with the baby, you let me know immediately.

Tammy will be coming down twice a week now. Again, show me you understand.”

Another nod.

“Good.”

Levi comes over, pushes aside a bottle on the coffee table so he can sit, and leans on his knees so they’re about even.

“You get one slipup,” he says. “Okay? One. I’m only giving you this because I know you’re stubborn and slow, which is a bad combination. And after that first slipup—”

He puts a hand on Crane’s shin.

“Every mistake after that is a broken bone.”

A bone. A finger, an arm, an ankle, a leg.

Crane recoils, tucking his hands to his chest. Can already feel the creak and the snap of a metacarpal.

“Any questions?”

Yes, actually. He goes for his phone to type it out in his Notes, but Levi took it. His mind stalls. Can’t think further than that, can’t put together the pieces it takes to find a piece of paper and a pen. His hands flap helplessly, then beat together.

“What?” Levi says. “Shit.” He casts around the living room and comes up with the instruction manual for a DVD player they’ve never used. “Spell it.”

A single trembling finger, a tiny speck of black polish still settled near the nailbed, fumbles for three letters: W, H, Y .

If this is what’s going to happen, he deserves an answer.

He deserves to understand. And yes, there are so many things that one-word question could be asking, but he’d take any of the responses, no matter what.

Why did the hive choose him. Why does it want this baby so bad. Why is Levi doing this to him.

He’d never thought that the two of them loved each other, but he didn’t think Levi hated him enough to do this.

All Levi does is snort. “Why? That ain’t my business, and it certainly ain’t yours.”

There’s a cluster of Sharpie tally marks counting weeks on the wall beside the gun safe.

When Tammy saw it for the first time, she mumbled, “Lord above.” Crane stood apart from her awkwardly.

Her visits to the apartment used to be a moment of peace, a chance to lean his head against her, her hair and skin smelling like lavender shampoo and baby powder.

These days he can barely look at her. “Twenty already.”

Now it’s twenty-two. Almost twenty-three.

The end of September means the weather is halfway decent and the HVAC failures aren’t as noticeable as they used to be.

It never rains and the days are long. They drag on.

Crane sleeps, checks Stagger’s faint but present pulse, eats the same thing every day, watches reruns of the Discovery Channel.

He asks Levi for a book of crossword puzzles from the grocery store, then a blank notepad.

He tries to teach himself to draw again, but the only things he remembers how to draw are dragons and horses. All his people come out looking stupid.

According to the calendar, if Crane remembers correctly, today is Luna’s fourth birthday.

Without his phone, he tries to imagine the kind of photos Birdie is posting on social media, the sorts of things she’s posted before.

Pancakes with whipped-cream smiles; a trip to the local bookstore to wander through the picture books and plushies.

In each one, Luna’s face will be artfully obscured from the camera lens, every identifying mark of the neighborhood scrubbed.

The heart emoji covering the house number will look cute instead of rightfully paranoid.

The caption will be plain, my little girl , with an unironic #blessed because she is.

And the photo will have a lot of likes. They always do.

Crane has no idea who those people are, if they’re Birdie’s actual friends, if she knows them, or if there’re just a few hundred queers latching on to a trans woman in some version of domestic happiness.

That sort of thing always pissed him off. Those random people don’t know her like he does. They haven’t helped her make dinner or put Luna down to bed. They haven’t showed up on her doorstep, slept in her bed, played cards with her spouse. Not like him.

What gives him the right to be so upset about any of it, though? There aren’t even any pictures for him to look at—maybe she didn’t post anything at all this year. And it’s not like he was ever supposed to be a part of their life, not really.

When Tammy knocks for the second of her twice-weekly check-ins, Crane doesn’t get up from the couch and Levi isn’t home, so Stagger opens the door to let her inside.

Jess comes in too. Apparently, she’s also here.

“Right,” Tammy mutters, stepping around Stagger so she doesn’t have to get too close. “Sweetheart, when’s the last time you took the trash out?”

“I can wait in the car,” Jess says.

“Nope. Find the garbage bags and go take everything out to the dumpster.”

Jess, still in her summer hand-me-downs supplemented with more seasonally appropriate thrift store finds, wrinkles her nose but does as she’s told, disappearing into the kitchen and thumping around in the cabinets.

Stagger keeps an eye on her—she even puts her hair the way Sophie used to, twisted up and pinned to the head with that claw clip—while Tammy comes over to the couch, sits stiffly, slaps her arthritic hands in her lap.

“Belly,” she says. “Let’s see it.”

Crane uncurls.

His tits are fatter and heavier, crammed into the same shitty sports bra he’s been wearing for years, and his stomach is impossible to ignore now.

It encroaches into his lap, demands ever more space from his bladder and lungs, stretches the skin until lines dig across his hips. It doesn’t feel like his body anymore.

In the kitchen, Jess finds a trash bag and shakes it out. Stagger grumbles at the noise.

“Getting bigger,” Tammy muses, pressing her hands against the bump. “You feel her yet?”

Crane looks up. Her?

“You’re carrying high. Just a guess.”

Well, stop guessing. Crane is going to continue to use it , thank you very much.

As for movement, he shrugs. It isn’t very active. Just a jostle every now and then, brushing against the inside of his body. It makes him think he’s swallowed a fly and it’s crawling its way through his intestines.

Jess fetches the trash from the bathroom, the bedroom, dumps it all into a bag, and hauls it out the door without a word.

Tammy asks her usual questions—has he been drinking enough water, has he been smoking, any pain that he’s concerned about.

And then there are new ones—how rough is Levi during sex.

(They haven’t been having sex at all, and Crane vacillates wildly between fucking touch me and don’t even look at me .) Is Stagger being gentle. (Always.) Is he safe. (No response.)

Jess comes back, the heavy metal door shutting too heavily like it always does.

“Are you okay?” Tammy asks.

What the fuck is Crane supposed to say to that?

“Saw someone out there trolling for parking stickers,” Jess cuts in, saving him. “Should probably head out soon if we don’t want to get towed.”

Tammy groans and forces herself to her feet. “Goddamn tow trucks. Let me go to the bathroom and I’ll be right back.”

Tammy shuffles off, and Jess crosses her arms by the front door.

Jess has put on muscle since she started working for the hive.

Or maybe she was way too skinny before, and she’s finally getting meat back on her bones.

She’s been helping Tammy in the yard all summer, lugging boxes of drinks and overflowing bags of garbage through the gas station, dragging bodies to the hive.

She doesn’t flinch away from Stagger anymore, either.

“Levi out?” Jess says, presumably to either of them.

Crane nods.

“He gonna be out for a while? Few days, or?”

Crane thinks for a moment about the specifics, then shrugs. There’s an enforcer from South Carolina who’s just come down. She’s new to the job and swung by to learn the ropes. Crashing in Sean’s old house for the week, actually. Levi’s been in and out. Why, what does she care?

Jess seems as if she’s preparing to say something else but stops herself.

Her jaw is taut. Her knuckles are white.

She looks at this entire place with unrestrained disgust—but especially him.

Of course it’s him. With his too-long hair and bloated stomach like a festering corpse and complete inability to get off the couch anymore.

A miserable creature rotting in the corner of a cheap apartment.

Tammy comes out of the bathroom and presses a kiss to the top of Crane’s head. “?’Night, baby.” And then she steps out into the ugly concrete hall, crinkling one of the neighbor’s windswept chip bags as she goes.

Again, Jess hesitates. Still in the doorway. Jaw moving, her teeth grinding.

“Whatever,” she says, and follows.