Page 36 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human

Twenty-Six

The insomnia is killer. Out of everything, that’s what gets him the most. The practice contractions are bad, and the hip pain, which Tammy explained is the result of ligaments loosening so the baby actually has a chance of getting the hell out, is a nightmare.

But the insomnia? Fuck that. The only thing that reliably works is forcing himself to stay up as long as possible, sitting too close to the TV or turning on the terrible “big light,” until he passes out wherever he happens to be.

Not that he ever feels rested upon waking up.

When he does sleep, he dreams of finding a knife hidden in the silverware drawer, a knife that Levi must have missed, and sneaking up on him while he sleeps and opening up that scar.

In the dream, Crane reaches inside the wound and grabs what he thinks is a worm, but by the time he’s pulled it out, it’s just an unraveled jumble of intestine.

There can’t be any evolutionary benefit to this shit. It’s got to be a mistake, like the whole “human heads are too big to fit through the pelvis properly” thing.

Crane misses sleeping on his stomach. And not getting up every hour to piss.

Levi’s alarm clock says 2:16 p.m., and through the crack in the blackout curtains it’s snowing again, turning the woods beyond the property into a haze of brown and white. Crane is actively attempting to sleep, and failing, so he’s awake when there’s a knock on the door.

It spikes his heart rate. After what happened last time, of course it does. His anxiety is on a hair trigger. He reels, struggles upright, has to stop because the world swims and his vision darkens at the corners.

At the foot of the bed, Stagger sits up too.

Through the bedroom door, voices in the living room:

“Jess.”

“ Heyyy . Can I come in? Thanks so much.”

Jess? She’s here. Jess is here.

The front door whines and bangs shut.

“Does Tammy know you’re here?”

“Eh, she thinks I’m picking up a late lunch. Truck came to fill up the gas tanks and it fucked up our morning. I—no, back up. I wanted to see if Crane could chat. Go for a quick walk or something. We won’t go far, just right there, you can see it from the living room.”

“If he wants fresh air, he can open a window. You should probably go.”

“I’ll tell the worms what you did to Hannah.”

There is a long silence, and then footsteps, and then Jess is nudging her way into the bedroom.

She’s here. She’s got the baggy work pants, tan boots, and a blaze orange winter coat she definitely stole from Tammy’s dead husband, snow still stuck in her dark hair. Cheeks flushed red from the cold. In one piece. Alive, smiling apologetically.

“Oh my god,” she says. “You look like ass. Come on, let’s go outside. Let’s go.”

When the apartment complex was originally built just outside Washville, however long ago that was, there’d been a few decent amenities—a tiny pool, a playground, a picnic area.

Now, during the summer, the playground is a mess of wasp nests.

The pool hasn’t been operational since he moved in, either; used to be that Crane had to walk over to the ugly pool maintenance building every few weeks to reload the cheap plastic card for the laundry room, since that’s where they decided to park the terminal for some reason, and the only water in the pool has ever been shallow puddles stagnating on the tarp.

These days, Crane knows the operator code for the washer that runs a load for free (press light soil and normal cycle at the same time, then cold temp twice), so he hasn’t checked on it lately.

The complex isn’t doing well as a whole.

None of the tenants acknowledge each other, and there’re more empty units every week, less cars in the parking lot.

The dumpsters are overflowing, littered with broken glass, and someone left a couch on the edge of the lot last month to get chewed through by rats.

The heat still feels like it’s stuck on.

The bedroom windows stay open no matter how cold it is outside, because that’s the only way it’s tolerable.

He’s jotted it down in a notebook even though the leasing agent will never see it.

Now Crane is wearing one of Levi’s oversized camo jackets and slogging through the snow toward the picnic area, Jess trying not to laugh at the pregnant waddle.

“It’s not that noticeable,” she assures him. She looks to Stagger. “Right? It’s not that bad. Only if you’re looking for it.”

Stagger grunts, and Crane gives him the finger.

The air is crisp and cold and perfect. It’s been a while since he’s been outside, let alone in the sun, and Crane has to squint.

Stagger clears off a space on a bench for both of them to sit, but Jess stays standing, breath clouding in front of her face, hands jammed into her pockets against the chill.

While it would be technically true to say that Jess looks better than she did, considering the circumstances under which they last saw each other, almost anything would be better than that. She’s in one piece. She’s alive. She’s not drunk or bleeding out on the bathroom floor.

She says, “Tammy kept me updated. Said you messed yourself up, said it was bad, but. Fuck, dude.”

Crane just shrugs. He didn’t appreciate accidentally welding his eyes closed and nearly giving himself an infection with the piercings, but those were small prices to pay.

“Also…” She looks him up and down. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but seriously , when is the last time you showered.”

Crane does not want to talk about that.

Jess waves to get Stagger’s attention. “You fix that, okay? I know that piece of shit up there isn’t going to help.”

And then she hands over her phone, which has been opened to the jankiest text-to-speech app Crane has ever seen in his life. It’s riddled with advertisements and the UI is ugly as sin.

She says, “The good ones are like a hundred dollars, but I thought it might work for now?”

Crane frowns.

“Only if you’re okay with it, though. Tammy says you don’t even like writing notes, so I was worried this might be pushing it.”

Crane doesn’t respond. He’s too busy tapping through the options. It’s nothing like the AAC program Aspen and Birdie have on the tablet. No prepared phrases, no autofill, nothing. It seems straightforward enough, though.

It’s embarrassing how long he wanted to be silent before the hive finally gave him permission.

In kindergarten, Sophie growled and hissed at people until Mom got sick of it and begged her to use her words like a big girl.

In middle school, she researched what injuries could damage her voice box until the computer’s cyber-nanny kicked in and alerted the teacher.

She wanted to stop, but she was so smart and so eloquent that it was never going to happen.

Crane is silent now. He has control.

He takes the phone and types, “Thank you.” The generated voice is a janky mishmash cobbled together from cut-and-paste syllables.

“Oh god,” Jess says, “it sounds so bad.”

“That’s why it was free.”

“Yeah, I hear it now!” Jess leans over Crane’s shoulder as if looking at the screen will reveal why the audio quality is utter shit. “I’m sorry, that sucks. We don’t have to use this if you don’t want.”

“It’s fine.”

“Can I ask? Why you don’t talk. If that’s too personal, you can tell me to fuck off, but—when we met, you said you could, so I’ve been curious. Sue me.”

Crane mulls over his answer for a bit. “In high school, I won the statewide public speaking championship.”

Jess gapes. “No way.”

“Twice. Was gonna go to school for political comm, PR as backup.”

“Political—no. Absolutely not. You’re an asshole.”

The robotic voice reading out “Fuck you” is funny enough that Jess laughs, throwing back her head, vapor trailing into the air. The window to the apartment living room is right above them; Levi could probably see it, if he was keeping an eye on them.

“So, you were headed to school, had big dreams and everything. What happened?”

“Mental illness.”

“Oh hey,” Jess says. “Same.”

Crane raises an eyebrow.

“Probably,” she backtracks. “What, you think an okay person ends up here?”

Still, Crane isn’t sure it’s the same. The hive found Jess locked in a boarded-up room. Nothing even happened to Crane. She has a reason to be like this. He’s not sure he does.

They sit and watch the snow for a while. Jess sticks out her tongue to catch a flake. Crane leans against Stagger’s arm for warmth, tries breathing out like a dragon the way he used to when he was little. He hadn’t realized how much he missed fresh air until he was out here.

Jess says, “Anyway, I wanted to apologize. For, you know, everything I said last time. I was drunk and fucked-up and had definitely lost a lot of blood, but it was still awful.”

Crane hates apologies, and explaining that she was, in fact, correct about everything she said would probably take too much time. Holding the phone properly is hard enough as it is. “I should be apologizing to you.”

“Don’t you dare. If you say sorry to me, I’m taking my phone back.”

“He does make you feel crazy.”

Jess’s eyes suddenly go a bit glassy. “Oh. Yeah. He does.”

“Did it work?”

Jess sniffles and presses a knuckle into the corner of her eye. “I told myself I wasn’t going to get emotional, you motherfucker.” She clears her throat to get the hitch out of her voice but it doesn’t work, and then she’s hugging him.

Crane freezes. It’s awkward, Jess kind of half-collapsed onto the bench to get down to his level, but her arms are wrapped tight. She smells like Tammy’s cheap body wash and dollar-store hair conditioner, a generic brand of dryer sheets. Like the closest thing Crane’s had to home in a long time.

“No,” she mumbles against Crane’s shoulder, and now she’s really crying. “It didn’t work. Uh, I really managed to wreck my internal organs, but when we got to the hospital and they stitched it all up, turns out the fetus was still fine. Then one of the nurses slipped me this.”

It’s a business card. Shoddy and simple, definitely mass-produced in someone’s living room, but it gets the point across.

Pregnant? Need help? Call.

“They mailed abortion pills to the house. I miscarried. It’s gone.”

Crane, for a moment, is flooded with so much rage and regret and helplessness it makes him sick.

It’s not fair that he didn’t realize what had happened until it was too late.

It’s not fair that the hive dragged him back before Aspen and Birdie could save him.

It’s not fair that this is how it’s ending.

But he is glad for Jess. If anyone deserves to avoid this, it’s her.

Once Jess has finished crying, wiping her nose on her sleeve, she clears snow off the edge of the table and hops up to look out into the forest behind the apartment complex, feet swinging.

“Can you be honest with me real quick?” she says.

“I reserve the right to change my mind.”

She snorts. “That night in the car. When you told me that if I tried to leave, y’all would kill me. Is that true?”

“Do you plan on finding out?”

Jess doesn’t give him anything to go on.

She just keeps looking out toward the woods.

The big, hibernating trees bending under the weight of wet snow.

It’s so quiet out here that, without Jess’s voice or the droning of the app, if they wait long enough, they can hear a branch snap under the weight of it.

“If you ran,” she says, “where would you go?”

Crane is aware that his knee-jerk answer is stupid.

Canaan Valley. It’s stupid because Canaan is literally fifteen minutes away from Washville, right past the Wash County line, and also because the main draw of the place is a ski resort, which Crane has no interest in.

It’s just that, last year, a customer at the gas station was talking about the townhouse her family rented for a ski trip, and it had sounded so wonderful that he hasn’t been able to get it out of his head since.

Rugs on the wooden walls, a spiral staircase, low ceilings, and dark carpets.

Crane wouldn’t even do anything. He’d lie on the couch, probably do crosswords in a book left behind by the last vacation-renters, sit on the back porch in his coat alone.

But if Jess was right about one thing, so was the hive.

This world was not made for ones like you.

He’s made peace with how this is ending, he thinks. He’s pretty sure. The idea of running—of getting away, of living—is so impossible to consider that it borders on painful.

Crane types, “I wouldn’t survive out there.”

Jess’s expression is tinged with pity, but she says, “I’ve always wanted to go to California.”

That sounds nice, too.

Even if Crane did go back to the world, even if he was capable of leaving all this behind, which he’s not, what would he even do?

He has no legal ID that isn’t a fake, no money that actually belongs to him, no place to sleep that wouldn’t be the back of the Camry.

Aspen and Birdie want nothing to do with him, and returning to his parents would be an act of unimaginable cruelty.

They probably accepted Sophie’s death years ago.

Grieved her properly and moved on, still loving the little girl they lost. He can’t do that to them.

When Crane gets back to the apartment, Levi has the TV on.

It’s the news, the same thing as always.

Cost of living rising exponentially, overlapping zoonotic diseases, investigations of the terrorist who drove a truck into a Thanksgiving crowd.

Conspiracy theories that Crane doesn’t believe, like pasteurized milk turning children trans, and conspiracy theories he does believe, like the vice president having a brain-eating amoeba (because why else would he be acting this way).

There are people who believe the theory to the point of trying to give themselves amoebas, though.

Crane is gone but he’s not that far gone.