Page 46 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human

Thirty-Three

A daughter, the hive cries, a daughter, how beautiful, how perfect.

The baby—Crane’s baby—is the color of a bruise and scrunched like balled-up paper.

She’s smeared with waxy pith and blood. Her head is a strange shape and her patchy dark hair is plastered to her flat, ugly face.

Her crying isn’t even real crying. It’s a desperate croaking noise as her lungs expel amniotic fluid and fill with real, true air for the first time.

It has to hurt. It has to be so strange and so cold out here, outside her father’s body.

Crane’s next breath comes out as a shudder.

He collapses, falls against Stagger’s chest. On instinct, somehow, he cradles the back of her head, supports the weak chicken-neck tendons as if he knows she’ll break if he doesn’t.

She’s so soft too. So much sturdier than the twenty-week creature in that grocery bag.

A twisting blue cord protrudes from her belly and leads right back between his legs.

She croaks again. Wails. Nuzzles her tiny face against Crane’s bare chest.

She is so so so small.

Crane watches her. He’s waiting for worms to crawl out from under her skin, for her to open her mouth to show festering rot and putrid meat. But there’s none of that. He presses his nose to her temple and she smells like salt and insides. Like a human. Not a worm. No distinct stink of dead.

There has to be something. He smooths back her hair, inspects her tiny face to find it: some sort of horrible transmutation, a physical manifestation of why she’s here. But Hannah’s baby had nothing wrong with it, and there’s nothing wrong with this baby either. She’s just a baby.

“Looks healthy,” Tammy says, checking his daughter’s fingers, counting to make sure she has all her toes. Levi can’t look away. Stagger leans over Crane’s shoulder to peer at the fragile creature he helped Crane birth. “Sounds healthy, too.”

Oh, little one.

The towels and blankets make thick wet sounds as Crane tries to find a more comfortable position. He is exhausted. He is ripped-open and sore, he wants to sleep for a thousand years, and she’s so warm against his bare chest.

She is alive and she is not a maggot or a beast or—or—

She keeps moving. Waving her tiny arms, bright-red feet tucking up protectively to her belly.

Opening and closing her weak-muscled mouth.

She’s so much bigger than he thought she’d be.

How did this come out of him? He puts a hand over her ears to keep them warm, but his hands tremble.

He’s shaking. He didn’t realize he was shaking so bad until Stagger reaches up to hold his jaw.

“He okay?” Levi asks.

“Happens sometimes,” Tammy replies plainly. “Get over here, help me cut the cord.”

Crane wants to give her a name but can’t come up with one that isn’t tainted somehow. He wouldn’t be able to tell it to anyone anyway. Levi will probably name her without him.

He hates that.

Tammy is tying things around the umbilical cord, telling Levi to make sure Crane doesn’t accidentally nudge her while she has the scissors.

This little girl isn’t the one who did this to him.

None of this is her fault. It would’ve been a kindness to excise her from the body months ago instead of letting her be yanked from oblivion to end up here.

She didn’t want this, she didn’t ask for this.

She deserved to be born to someone capable of loving her, defending her, making the world better for her. Not him.

She’s so helpless and it’s not right.

She is perfect.

“Crane,” Tammy whispers. Crane barely manages to tear his eyes away from his baby.

His baby. His. The brain has latched on to that word and won’t let it go.

“You did good. You hear me? You did good. There’s gonna be a few more contractions, though, yeah?

Have to get that placenta out of you so it don’t rot in there. ”

Crane’s head swims. There’s more? He has to go through more?

“It won’t be as bad,” she assures him. “It’s just an ugly jellyfish. A big clot. Ain’t no head or shoulders to push out, so it should be a breeze. Just rest.”

He nods. Behind him, Stagger makes an animalistic snuffling sound.

“There a name yet?” Tammy asks.

“Still working on that,” Levi answers for him.

Levi is getting close now—the first time he’s gotten this close since this all started, almost stepping into the mess of amniotic fluid and whatever mess of liquid comes out during birth. Stagger growls.

“Fuck,” Levi says. “She’s tiny.”

Apparently that’s the only thing either one of them can think.

Levi skims his fingertips over her dark hair.

It has the tiniest hint of a curl to it, a wave.

Like Crane’s hair. Crane wonders if he was born with a full head of dark hair.

Or if Levi was. Thinking of Levi as a baby is so deeply, heart-shatteringly depressing that he can’t hold it in his head for long.

Levi’s thumb brushes her little nose, then the divot that makes up her spine.

In response, the baby just makes that same choking sound and struggles against Crane’s chest, as if gaining control of her limbs is painful.

Crane imagines it’d be like pins and needles all over, after being cramped up for so long.

“Is she hungry?” Levi asks. “Is that why she’s crying? Do we have to teach her or—” He looks to Tammy. “Does she know?”

“No need to rush her,” Tammy says. “She’ll figure it out. But if you want to try…”

Tammy shows Crane how to position the baby against his breast so her mouth can find the nipple, but she isn’t interested. She’s upset and tired and getting used to breathing air. Tammy says that’s normal. Give her a bit.

Eventually—Crane doesn’t know how long it takes—the placenta comes out too.

It doesn’t hurt nearly as bad, and Stagger and Levi and Tammy help him sit up, make sure gravity does most of the work.

When it comes out, it looks like a slab of raw meat, or an excised deer liver.

Levi wraps it up to stick in the cooler, to give it to the hive later.

And then it’s done. It’s really done.

Tammy says, “Hey, baby. You okay?”

Crane doesn’t know. He hasn’t let go of his daughter ( his daughter ) since she was placed in his arms. She’s finally latched to nurse, and it’s a bizarre feeling.

Reminds him of the semi-painful tingling in his jaw when he bites down on a piece of fruit, saliva glands rushing to fill the mouth with spit.

He keeps wincing, but it’s not that bad.

When she’s done, Levi says, “Alright, let’s introduce her.”

It takes Crane a second to understand what he means— introduce her. To who? His head is sticky and slow.

But the flies lift their shiny wings and the worms slide across each other, chattering their jaws and, oh.

Our little one, the hive whispers in the same voice they use to draw in the hungry, desperate people they feed on. She’s beautiful.

No.

Crane growls. Levi can’t have her. The urge to protect her borders on animal. It’s not her fault that half of her is made out of Levi, it’s not her fault that half of her is made out of Crane. None of that matters. Levi doesn’t get to touch her.

She’s perfect, the hive says. Let us see her.

“C’mon.” Levi takes a step closer, but Crane jams himself against Stagger’s chest, can feel himself baring his teeth. “Don’t do this shit. She’s out of you, your job’s done. Thought you didn’t even want her.”

He—he didn’t. Of course he didn’t. This is fucking awful, and he is so aware that this obliterated some part of him he’s never going to get back. But it’s not her fault , and nobody else is going to protect her, are they? Nobody but him.

Let us see her.

Levi sighs. Gets himself down on Crane’s level. Snaps his fingers to get his attention.

Crane is going to kill him. The moment the strength is back in his limbs, the moment , Crane is going to grab that shotgun and put a slug through his head and fucking kill him.

Oh child, she will not make it without us.

She needs us just as we need her.

Levi says, “Look at me.”

Levi lifts the hem of his shirt to show the scar.

Under the skin, it’s moving. Just like it was before. The baby snuffles and coughs like she knows something’s not right, like she can feel Crane’s panicked heartbeat through the skin of his chest. She probably can. She’s been listening to it for so long.

“See?” Levi says. “They did it to me. I took it fine.”

Is that what happened in McDowell? To Stagger? In the workshops Irene talked about?

We have tried so many times, the hive says, to make ourselves as perfect for this world as we can. To make ourselves in the image of our children.

To walk among you instead of hiding in dark rooms.

To see the sun on our faces.

Levi lowers his shirt. How many times was Crane eye level with that scar when he was sucking Levi’s cock? How many times did he accidentally brush it when they were naked together?

“Barely even hurt,” Levi says. “Our friend over here, though—” His eyes slide to Stagger.

Crane realizes there is a version of all this where Stagger was the father.

He chews through the scenario in a heartbeat, swallows it whole, wonders if this would have been easier with someone who treated him gently.

“Not gonna lie, I thought he was going to manage it. Guess not. Fucked him up pretty bad.”

The father’s compatibility with our flesh; the mother’s bitterness and hunger and submission.

She will be perfect. She will be beautiful. She will carry us into the sun.

Crane is biting the inside of his cheek so hard the thin membranes pop between his teeth.

His child is a little girl, and he sees the writing on the wall.

This is no universe in which they don’t do to her exactly what they did to him.

There is no way out of this. He swallows down bile, and he’s shaking again.

He just keeps shaking. As long as she’s alive, the hive will look for her.

He cannot destroy every worm, he cannot kill every fly and every hidden maggot in every dark corner in West Virginia.

She will never be safe. She will never be allowed to grow up happy or whole, because the hive will always want her and her body and her ability to create more people just like her.

“Give her to me,” Levi says.

Crane presses his face against her cheek, tucks his head against her shoulder. She knows who he is. She knows his smell, the texture of his skin, the rhythm of his breathing.

If the world was better, he could bring her to Aspen and Birdie’s doorstep and collapse there, push her into their arms and beg them to keep her away from him.

All he’ll ever be able to see in her is Levi and everything he did, and that is so unimaginably cruel.

Or he could take his parents up on the offer.

Mom always did want grandkids. Maybe she’d be okay raising her without him.

All he’d have to do is ask, and his parents would tilt the world off its axis to help.

It would be beautiful, if that was possible.

But it’s not. She can survive the infestation. She can carry the worms and not be eaten alive from the inside out. Just like Levi. She will be broken down into the same breeding bitch they made out of Crane, because that is what she was born to be.

Crane needs to do the right thing for once in his life.

His silence may be consent, but hers is not.

He remembers—his face pressed to his daughter’s skin, watching the wretched hive wait in baited silence—that up until the, what, late 1980s?

Doctors thought newborns couldn’t feel pain.

Or didn’t have the capability to remember it after the fact.

And so they performed surgery on them without anesthesia, only muscle relaxers to paralyze them.

If Levi opened her up to cram a beast inside her, she would feel every agonizing moment of it.

Do the right thing.

It’s the only kindness he’s ever been capable of giving.