Page 30 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human

“It’s nothing we can’t handle, but you’re enough as it is. I don’t want to deal with cleaning up the mess their deaths will make. Especially with a kid involved.”

Levi hands over the key to Aspen and Birdie’s house.

“So I’m giving you a chance to fix the situation before I do.”

This motherfucker. This awful, cruel, unfathomable monster of a man.

Crane wishes he could have beaten him to death with that pipe months ago.

It wouldn’t have done anything about the pregnancy, but then Crane would have gotten to see Levi’s face bashed in and bleeding out into the gravel, and it would have been beautiful.

Crane hears Aspen and Birdie before he sees them.

They’re calling his name. Or, Birdie is. Her voice echoes through the bones of the abandoned building, bouncing off tall ceilings and soft beams of rotting wood.

He knew, before hearing her, that he was actually in this situation, that this was in fact happening.

But the tiny slivers of hope that’d managed to lodge in his chest, whispering maybe it wasn’t going to happen the way it inevitably would—that their car would catch a flat halfway up the mountain, that they’d realized it was a trap and turned back—finally dissolves.

“Crane?”

Levi takes it as his cue, climbing out of the pit and into the pitch-black stands.

No light touches him at all. Crane can find only the outline of him because he knows Levi is there, settling himself into a plastic chair with the Mossberg across his lap.

Those things are good for fifty yards minimum, and Crane finds himself wondering about the ammunition.

The spread situation, mainly. With buckshot it’s, what is it, an inch every three feet, he thinks.

If this goes south, if there’s buckshot in that gun instead of a slug, could Levi put lead in them both?

Crane forces himself to breathe. His lungs are operating manually.

And, god, there they are.

Birdie, using her phone as a flashlight, probably because her therapist and anxiety meds just convinced her it was okay to disassemble her own bugout bag, steps awkwardly into the showroom pit.

Aspen follows, backpack hoisted over one shoulder.

Birdie’s flashlight sears into Crane’s vision.

He raises a hand to block it, blinking against the beam digging into his corneas.

It obliterates his night vision. He loses track of Levi immediately.

“Oh,” Birdie says, “shit.”

She points the light at the ground. Aspen stops in the middle of the dusty wood chips, attention locked on Crane’s distended belly.

It reminds Crane of the way you’d look at a friend’s amputated leg or gunshot wound for the first time: recalibrating your mental image of their body, permanently altered.

“We were calling for you,” Birdie says, maniacally nervous. The spot of light on the ground jitters. She takes a step forward, then another. “Did you not hear us? The car’s right outside. Let’s go.”

In the corner of Crane’s eye, the darkness shifts. The shotgun.

Crane takes a step back.

Birdie stops mid-stride, face suddenly stricken with some emotion or another, Crane’s always been bad at this, don’t ask him to translate those minute muscle adjustments now.

“Okay,” Aspen says, putting out a reassuring hand. “Okay.”

They both look different. That makes sense, as people tend to change over the course of a couple months.

Aspen has an honest-to-god beard now, far more filled out than Crane’s awkward patches, and a new tattoo covering up the remnants of their third and final childhood attempt.

And Birdie’s hair has grown out longer. It’s currently tied back in the plain ponytail of every tired mom.

Motherhood suits her, but that’s not new. It always has.

Crane misses them so much. Everything he hasn’t let himself feel to stay sane collides into his brain at once.

It hurts. Aspen’s soft hands and Birdie’s gentle smile.

The way Birdie tears up when she laughs, how Aspen talks to Luna like she’s a grown woman instead of a toddler.

The time Crane awoke on the couch to find the two of them slow-dancing to a commercial on the radio.

Their love for each other spilling over into their daughter and into him too.

It’s not fair that this is how it ends, it’s not fair.

But this is what happens when he makes his own decisions.

Aspen finds a new angle. “Crane,” they say, “what’s going on?”

It’s been so long since Crane strung a sentence together out loud that it fails him. The part of his brain in charge of this has been disconnected, or fried, or hacked away.

Another attempt: “Whatever’s going on, we can figure it out.

Do you have a bag with you? It’s fine if you don’t.

I brought clothes, and we can pick up anything else.

Listen to Birdie.” Birdie blinks nervously, staring into the dark.

“The car’s right outside. We can be gone before your boyfriend has any idea. ”

Crane can almost hear Levi smiling in the stands. The son of a bitch could be looking directly at Birdie, showing her all his teeth in the dark, and she’d have no idea.

He wants to lose it but he doesn’t. Once they’re gone, Crane can lose it all he wants.

Levi can drag him to the gas station and run the bathroom sink and shove his head underwater, shut him in with the hive until his meltdown is done, ignore him and walk away—whatever.

It doesn’t matter. Crane doesn’t care. Aspen and Birdie and Luna will be safe.

Birdie is panting now, one of her usual tactics for trying to get enough oxygen into her blood, or maybe getting enough carbon dioxide out of her lungs.

“Babe?” she says as if her throat is constricted. “I think—”

Crane holds up the key to the townhouse.

“Okay,” Aspen says again, fixed on the key’s dull metal. “I think we’re in crisis mode. Am I right? You’re scared. Probably having trouble thinking straight. That’s all the adrenaline in your brain; makes it tough to figure out what to do. That’s okay. I get it.”

Aspen sounds like their fucking shrink. Who gives a shit about therapy-speak. There’s a gun in this room and it’s trained at their center mass.

It’s not enough to make them leave, is it.

If they just leave, there’s always the chance they’ll come back, there’s always the chance Levi will deem it all a failure and swing down from the stands and do it himself.

Cut out their livers and kidneys for Stagger, feed the rest to the hive, take their wedding bands as trophies, and put them on Crane’s nightstand.

Crane jabs the key.

“You’re giving it back,” Aspen says plainly, double-checking they understand.

To Crane’s surprise, it’s Birdie who snaps.

“What the fuck!” she says. Aspen flinches, but she ignores it. “No. No. Who’s making you do this? Where’s that piece of shit boyfriend. This is him. Isn’t it?”

“Birdie,” Aspen warns.

“No! He didn’t—you didn’t bring us all the way out here for this.”

Another shift of the shotgun. Levi lifting it to the shoulder, just inches from looking down the sights.

“Birdie,” Aspen says again.

Birdie sucks in air, looking at her spouse. Crane watches them both do the mental math. The glance they share, that telepathic communication.

What are they debating in those heads of theirs?

How much they love him versus the danger they’re just now realizing they might be in, what with the weight of Crane’s piece of shit boyfriend suddenly bearing down on them?

Reviewing every memory of abusive parents and siblings and spouses left behind, the risk they’d be exposing Luna to, lessons of you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.

Battling the queer urge to light yourself on fire to keep someone else warm, giving everything you have to save a member of your community because you know, you know nobody but you will ever help.

Aspen and Birdie don’t just need to leave. They need to hate him.

Birdie’s already showing her dainty little teeth.

Aspen steps forward and takes the key.

And there’s a moment when it looks like they’re readying themself to say something stern—not just as a friend or a fellow queer, but as a journalist. Moments away from laying out the facts and dragging someone over to their side by force.

Okay, so.

Levi taught Crane how to throw a good punch.

For what it’s worth, Crane doesn’t do that.

His feet aren’t positioned properly, his body is permanently off-balance, he doesn’t follow through the way he should.

It’s sloppy and weak. Crane tells himself he did it on purpose, because he doesn’t really want to hurt them, which is better than accepting that this is the best he can do now.

Aspen’s still not prepared for it, though. Whatever they lived through before, whatever shit they’ve hid, it didn’t teach them to take a hit.

Crane’s fist collides with their jaw and sends them reeling, thumping mutedly into Birdie, who barely manages to keep them upright.

Birdie’s watery eyes flash with rage.

And then she’s screaming, “ Fuck you! ”

He’s never seen her like this. He didn’t think she was capable of it.

“Fuck you, Crane!” Birdie says. “Fine! You want to do this to yourself so bad, go ahead—I’m not about to drag you kicking and screaming—” Aspen straightens up, puts a hand to their jaw, opens their mouth, and closes it experimentally to check that nothing’s been knocked out of place.

“Kicking and screaming, when you’re just going to go back to him like you always do . ”

It hurts, but it should. He deserves it.

“Are you okay?” Birdie murmurs to Aspen.

“Yeah,” Aspen says cautiously. Holding the key, eyeing Crane like he’s a wild animal. Aspen and Birdie have never looked at him that way before. “Think so.”

“Okay.” Those pale eyes go back to Crane. “We’re leaving.”

Aspen, though, doesn’t move until Birdie takes them by the arm and pulls, so gently.

They step out of the auction pit.

Crane can’t remember how to breathe. It’s getting caught in his throat. His hand throbs where it hit the bone of Aspen’s jaw.

A few moments later, in the stands, Levi lowers the shotgun. He’s whispering. Counting out the time it takes to leave the auction building, get into the car, drive away.

One, two, three.

They’re safe, Crane tells himself. Aspen and Birdie and Luna are safe, and they’ll never come back to Washville again.

Fifty-four, fifty-five, fifty-six.

They’re alive, and they’ll stay that way, far away from him.

Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine—

One hundred.

They’re gone.

Levi lowers the shotgun, and Crane crumples onto the dusty, rotting floor.