Page 48 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human

Thirty-Five

W HAT HAVE YOU DONE?

His daughter has stopped moving. He holds her against his chest like he can turn his rib cage into her tiny grave.

Tammy screams.

WE SAVED YOU, WE MADE YOU, UNGRATEFUL FUCKING BEAST, AND THIS IS HOW YOU REPAY US?

And Crane is laughing. He won, motherfucker.

She will never know what it’s like to be scared, she will never have that bite on the inside of her wrist, she will never know the crunching of feeding worms or the betrayal of a body becoming something it wasn’t meant to be.

They’ll never be able to hurt her. He is naked on the floor, thighs smeared with afterbirth and bare chest dripping with gore.

His stomach is hollow and sagging. He’s laughing.

Fuck you.

Levi is the first to get his shit together.

He lunges for the baby, a feverish snarling attempt to wrestle the ragdoll-limp thing out of Crane’s arms as if there’s a possibility he can save it, reverse the damage, offer it to the hive anyway.

But Stagger catches him. Hits Levi like a bull.

Stagger the protector. Stagger the loyal, terrified man with worms crawling in between the folds of his gray matter.

He slams them both into the door with the dull clang of bone on metal, and they fall to the ground.

Stagger has Levi’s head between both his giant gloved hands.

Squeezing. Going to pop him like a piece of rotten fruit.

Up, get up. He has to get up. Crane can’t get his legs under him, can barely move them. If he couldn’t see, he would’ve guessed somebody had taken a chain saw to his cunt, ripped it open navel to tailbone. He fumbles away, drags himself backward. Baby held to his chest. Once. Twice.

He bumps into Tammy, who is hunched over with her breakfast splattered on her shoes.

Her eyes are blown with panic. Froth gathers at the corner of her mouth.

He’s never seen her panic before; Crane didn’t think she was capable of it.

She’s gotten pissed, she’s gotten mad as hell, but she’s been alive as long as him three times over. She’s not supposed to be this scared.

It takes Crane until that moment to realize that what he did was insane.

But it wasn’t. It was the clearest, sanest decision he’d ever made.

“You—” she gasps.

Levi grabs the shotgun. Racks it.

Stagger bashes Levi’s head against the door, and the shot goes wide.

Bang.

Loud enough that Crane’s hearing howls into static, obliterates everything else, sends him reeling.

Tammy’s torso rips open. Gut shot, slug, close range. It’s a monstrosity. Takes a chunk of meat out of her body and flings it across the manager’s office. Obliterates the lower ribs, shreds the flesh, grinds the organs into a useless pulp.

Chuck-chuck.

Tammy hits the ground. Gurgling. The woman who took him in and protected him, the woman he called Ma, even though he never said it out loud, the woman who refused to help him just because the hive told her no. She splutters.

Bang.

Second shot. Stagger’s shoulder disintegrates. It doesn’t stop him. The arm goes limp and writhing worms screech away from the wound, and Levi’s head hits the door again. There’s no noise except the screaming in Crane’s ears, but it has to be a wet, meaty sound, like something shattered. A crunch.

This place is going to eat itself alive.

Crane tastes gunpowder. His baby’s head lolls against his breast, the neck wound gaping open into a dark mouth.

He tries to use Tammy’s shoulder as a prop to get on his feet, but holding his daughter, the ruined fingers on his left hand, he can’t get it. He slips.

Chuck-chuck bang.

The third slug hits home. Stagger’s skull splits. Half of it is gone. His head a waning moon of worm pieces and bone.

Stagger reels back. Stumbles, tries to hold his dripping, collapsing head up.

Can’t. Half a worm falls out of the crevice chewed into his brain and thumps onto the ground.

Stagger crawls on his hands and knees for only a second, remaining eye darting around like it can see the damage if it just strains enough.

The shotgun slumps to the ground, out of Levi’s hands.

Crane watches Stagger die on the bloody, freezing floor. Can’t get to him before he sags into the nest of blankets as if attempting to crawl underneath them after a nightmare. The worms writhe in confusion. The body is abandoned, destroyed, useless. The man behind it is gone.

Maybe it was a mercy. Maybe that body wasn’t Stagger’s body anymore—the hive moving him without him, manually forcing each joint and muscle.

Or maybe the man was still there under the worms, hoping there was possibly, please god, a way out.

Perhaps he hoped that if he sat down with Crane long enough, if they used enough knives, they could take out all the parasites one by one.

At least have the chance to find out if his body could function without them, let his body be his own again.

Crane is sorry he couldn’t help.

He gets one foot under himself.

Then another.

Crane, finally standing, holding the baby, his baby, looks down at Levi.

Levi looks up at him.

Part of his head is dented, Crane realizes. Like Sean’s. Levi is trying to get the shotgun back into his hands, but he keeps fumbling it. Struggling. Making these ugly noises in the back of his throat.

Crane slides the shotgun away with his toe. Levi slaps his hand after it and succeeds only in rolling onto his side. God, it’s bad. The skull is cracked.

What does Levi see, looking up at him like this? A naked, mutilated woman, or the man he did this to?

Not that it matters much anymore.

Crane casts around the room for the safest place to leave his daughter before settling her snuggly against Stagger’s side. Stagger isn’t moving anymore, except for the worms, all trying to figure out what to do. There , Crane thinks, tucking her by Stagger’s hip. Take care of her for me.

He picks up the shotgun.

Levi taught him how to use this, once upon a time.

Behind the gas station. A cigarette dangling from Levi’s mouth, smiling as he pushed each shell into the gun and handed it off.

The model holds six shells plus one. Levi used only three.

Crane is trembling as he lifts it up, props it up against his chest, has to use his broken hand to pull back the action.

Shit. He remembered this being easier than it was. He can’t get it all the way back before he has to release it. There’s a quiet chunk sound. That’s not right.

Levi slurs out something that might be, “Jammed.”

The sliding part, the forestock he thinks, isn’t sitting right. He pulls the bolt back to open the chamber, finds a shell stuck halfway in. That’s not—no. That’s not supposed to happen. He shoves a finger in to get it unstuck but he’s shaking too hard, can’t get any leverage on it.

“Jammed,” Levi says again, and he’s grinning, and there’s blood all over his teeth.

Crane drops it. Fine. He’ll do it the hard way.

He stumbles out. Over Tammy. Through the manager’s office door, into the back hallway, and opens his go bag.

There’s the hammer, under the blanket. He grabs it and adjusts it in the hand until it feels just right.

“You ain’t gonna do that,” Levi says when Crane makes it back into the room, blood trickling over his thighs with every step. It’s gotten so hot in here. It smells like metal. Crane watches Levi brace himself on the floor, struggle to lift his head. “C’mon. Put it down.”

Levi says that like it’s not easy. Like it’s not muscle memory.

Grab Levi’s head, don’t react when he squawks and tries to squirm away, bring the clawed end of the hammer down on the open wound again, and again, and again, and again. Until it splits all the way and the head falls open and it’s a soupy, chemically mess left in the skull cavity.

Crane breathes hard. Sucks in the disgusting air. It feels correct, doesn’t it. Inflicting one fucking half of what Levi did to him, a fraction of it. And at least Levi gets to die, right? Crane’s not going to keep him alive for months, struggling and choking. Crane put him down. Crane is merciful.

Crane thought he’d feel better, looking at the broken skull. He doesn’t. He’s just tired, and empty.

So he goes for the scar.

It’s easy enough. Smash the clawed end into the keloid, get the hooks into the meat and wrench it open with all the strength he can muster. The worm underneath shuffles away, but it’s too slow. Crane reaches in and pulls it free.

It’s not even a particularly big worm. Nothing all that great, or impressive. It twists in the air like Stagger’s did, panicking at the sudden lack of shelter.

And there’s only one.

It dies as easily as the others.

Through the doorway, the hive refuses to move. None of the worms crawl over themselves. The flies have gone still. Like Crane is some sort of predator that can only sense movement; like he’s so out of his mind that maybe he’s going to let them go, after everything they’ve done.

They’re just a bunch of stupid bugs.

That hive comes apart as easily as Levi’s skull.

It’s a mess in here.

Crane shuffles to the pile of clothes he’d stripped during labor, but it’s all unusable.

Stained and splattered with insides. Tammy’s, probably.

Fuck. He goes back to the go bag, leaving red footprints across the concrete floor, and pulls out socks, underwear, sweatpants, a shirt.

He struggles into clean clothes, digs through Tammy’s belongings for an extra overnight pad, smooths it into his fresh boxers. He steals Tammy’s snow boots too.

Then it’s Levi’s jacket, hung up by the door. There’s only a bit of blood on this one. Also Tammy’s. He shrugs it on, then pulls a cigarette from the pocket, pops it into his mouth, lights it.

Crane takes a drag and picks up his baby to wrap her in Mom and Dad’s blanket. Up we go, that’s it. Her limbs dangle helplessly from her tiny body, so he makes sure she’s swaddled tight. He’s sorry he had to set her down. He was busy, that’s all.