Page 29 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human
Twenty
In the truck, parked in the grass in front of Tammy’s house, Levi holds Crane by the arm. “Stay.”
Irene walks Jess up to the porch and bangs on Tammy’s door. The gray Accord grumbles in the driveway. Jess’s jeans are stained red.
Through the windshield, Crane watches. He watches Tammy yank open the door. The horror dawning on her face. Irene shoving the car keys into her hands.
Stagger isn’t here. That’s not to say he hadn’t tried to follow; he had.
He’d grabbed Levi by the shirt and slammed him into the door, but unfortunately Levi isn’t the one with worms in his brain.
Levi said he wouldn’t tell the hive that Stagger let Crane leave the apartment if he backed up, right now.
And Crane took Stagger’s hand and pulled him and pulled him until he listened.
I’ll be fine, I’ll be okay, I get one mistake and you don’t, you don’t get to fucking die and leave me alone. I won’t let you.
So he stayed because Crane asked, and now Crane is alone.
At least Levi gives him one of the cigarettes. Crane is shivering like he’s fighting off cold chills, his back tense from muscle contractions. He has trouble lighting it and Levi refuses to do it for him. When it finally catches and he breathes out, smoke trickles out from between grit teeth.
Is Levi the one who knocked up Hannah?
Did the hive tell him to?
That can’t be correct. If they did, then Hannah and Jess would’ve been struggling with the same draconian bullshit Crane’s been cracking under for months. The hive doesn’t leave things up to chance. The hive doesn’t take risks like that.
The hive tells Tammy to stop checking on their girls, and this is what happens.
As Tammy raises her voice at Irene, “ Why the fuck didn’t you leave her in the goddamn car ,” Levi starts the truck up again and pulls out onto the gravel road. Wind whistles through the crack in the window meant to let out the smoke. The sun won’t rise for another hour now.
Levi gave him one slipup. It’s going to be okay.
Without taking his eyes off the road, Levi produces Crane’s phone and sticks it into the center console’s cupholder.
He says, “Your taste in porn is bizarre.”
Crane does not respond, not like he usually would—no grunt of acknowledgment, no snort of annoyance. He’s running on autopilot, breathing and blinking and not much else. Most of all, he has no idea what Levi is talking about, or why he would bring this up.
“Sure, the weird BDSM stuff I get,” Levi says.
“I know what you’re like. But…” Crane runs through what’s in his search history—the entirety of the gangbang and anal tags on XVideos; sadism scenes that always left him feeling gross even though he wanted to be the girl in those videos, not the sadist. Levi changes his mind and plucks the cigarette from Crane’s mouth because Crane must be paying too much attention to something that isn’t him.
“That AI-generated dog-fucker stuff is next level. I knew you had issues, but Jesus.”
It’s not often that Crane hates being autistic, but he does now. His brain feels like a tire spinning in the mud.
Levi frustratedly flicks the cigarette out the open window as they pull onto Corridor H. “Irene knows how to crack phones. She’s got a whole program for it and everything.”
No.
Crane snatches up his phone. He ignores his search history and his Notes and his photos, every other embarrassing or incriminating thing, and fumbles into his messages.
Levi couldn’t have, he wouldn’t, he said in the parking lot that he’d look the other way, that it was water under the bridge—
“We spent some time asking around,” he continues, “but we never did manage to track down any friends named Aspen or Birdie. They ain’t with a hive, are they?
” They both already know the answer. “They’ve got a kid and everything.
I knew you were slow, and that’s fine, I don’t got a problem with that, but I didn’t think you were stupid . ”
The messages load. The latest one is from earlier this morning, three a.m.
Levi did a good job—the texts sent from Crane’s phone read almost like Crane himself. Not perfect, of course, but close enough in cadence and grammar that Aspen and Birdie wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
Crane, but not really, not actually him: sorry
Crane: sorry, I’m sorry
Aspen: Crane?
A missed video call notification, then another. He can’t believe they were up. That they were awake to see the message come in.
Birdie: weve been so worried oh my god we were so scared
Birdie: is everything okay???
Crane: I need to get out I need to leave. Please
And then the address of the abandoned livestock exchange.
His vision blurs. The tiny words on the screen smear into near illegibility. Levi mimicked Crane’s panic and desperation as he begged them to come, said he’d be hiding inside, he’ll be ready at six a.m. and he’s sorry he scared them so much, he’s so sorry.
Crane has never been colder in his life.
Not when he plunged himself into an ice bath in high school to keep from panicking over his AP tests.
Not when he saw the second line on that pregnancy test. Not when he crawled out of the trunk of Mike’s car covered in vomit and collapsed into the cool grass.
Aspen and Birdie are on their way. The truck’s clock says 5:40. The livestock auction is ten minutes out.
The shotgun is in the truck, the box of bright red shells crammed under the seat.
Crane: don’t—
Levi snatches the phone and sends it after the cigarette. They’re moving fast enough that Crane doesn’t get the chance to watch the off-brand smartphone shatter on the concrete road.
Crane’s hands are held awkwardly, like the phone is still between his fingers. Everything’s shut down, complete disconnection between his head and his hands, his brain and the rest of him.
“First strike was leaving the apartment,” Levi says. “But the second was this.”
The abandoned auction building, the ugly brick thing at the end of a weed-infested concrete lot, is called the Farmers Livestock Exchange Inc.
, Washville WV, Auction Every Monday, and yes that is the full legal name on all official government documents and nailed in big letters above the entrance.
It’s never once run the entire time Crane has been in Wash County.
No cars in the lot and no cows in the pens.
Just busted-out windows and a front door covered in papers informing trespassers that this is private property, and also deeply unfit for human habitation or use.
Levi holds the shotgun in one hand and the back of Crane’s neck in the other as he leads him into the building.
The front door is locked, so he has to yank open the cattle gate, push Crane through, shove him under a metal roll-up door stuck partway open.
The place has been abandoned so long it doesn’t smell like animals anymore.
It’s all dirt and the residual heat from the end of summer.
The only reason Crane isn’t crying is because everything has gone offline. A computer closing every noncritical function to keep from destroying its processors.
Jess was right. Levi makes you feel crazy. Wears you down until you’re too confused or scared or dead to fight back.
“Considering how shit you are with people,” Levi says as he marches Crane through the maze of dirt floors, concrete and tall ceilings, and wooden supports, “I’m shocked you managed to trick two other people into fucking you.”
Crane’s never slept with Aspen or Birdie.
That’s not to say he hadn’t thought about it, or wanted to, or tried.
He dreamed of it: letting both of them use him however they wanted.
Hell, they’re literally in an open marriage.
It’s just that the one time he asked, the one time he typed it into his AAC app, they’d looked at each other and had a moment of long-term-relationship telepathy that must’ve consisted of absolutely not .
On moral grounds, apparently. They didn’t want to take advantage of him, and Crane didn’t have the heart to type, But that’s what I want.
“Guess it’s only fair, though. Shocked you figured out the thing with me and Jess.”
They’re not walking where the farmers would follow the cattle to the inside holding pens and auction rooms. Instead, they’re down where the livestock would trundle to sale. A bird flutters through the rafters.
Levi’s still smiling. It’s cracking at the corners.
“If you’d had the brain cells to fuck somebody from McDowell—or hell, even the Ivanhoe hive—we wouldn’t have to do all this. But here we are. We’ve always gotta do things the hard way with you.”
And, of course. The one time Crane wants to break his silence, wants to beg— don’t hurt them, please don’t hurt them. On his hands and knees, plead for him not to take Aspen and Birdie away from Luna, to not involve them, to punish him and not them, not them please.
The one time he wants to speak, he opens his mouth and only croaks.
The door to the main showroom is open. Together, they step into the sunken pit, shoes crunching in the ancient wood chips and sawdust bedding.
They’re flanked by towering fences, the auctioneer’s box, the concrete bleachers and old chairs and advertisements for companies that haven’t been in Washville for years.
Anything interesting or useful has been picked clean.
No computers left in the box, no speakers still anchored to the walls.
“In the interest of clarity,” Levi continues, “I did some research. And as it turns out, they are both—”
He double-checks the slug in the chamber of the shotgun.
“—decently known and well-liked members of their community. A journalist and a teacher. They’d be deeply missed, grieved, all that annoying shit.”
Crane absolutely does not correct him that Aspen is only an assistant at the news outlet and Birdie is just IT for the school system, who helps out with computer classes sometimes.
The safety comes off.