Page 35 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
The bag is translucent, but all he can make out is the off-white dish towel wrapping up the miniature corpse. His long fingers—chewed-on nails with clinging specks of polish, cut-up knuckles—pick at the flimsy knot holding the package closed. The same way they used to pick at his scalp or press nervously against the edge of a knife. Autonomously, without his consent.
He could justaskTammy what it looked like when they get back. Or Jess even, right now. The pregnancy tracker online likes to show a perfect tiny baby, if not uncomfortably spindly, so he has to go tomedical photos to get an honest depiction—at this stage, a real baby would be an eerie translucent red with swollen eye sockets and nub-fingers. Unsettling, a growing bird taken out of the egg too soon.
Stagger jams the shovel through a root, pries away a rock. Jess asks him, “So do you have a name, or?” and he doesn’t reply.
The bag comes undone.
Crane pushes aside the plastic flaps, skimming the dish towel shroud.
There has to be a difference betweenbabiesand whatever grows inside people like him and Hannah. Whatever the worms could possibly want so badly as to remove Tammy from her duty, to do this to him on purpose, to force into existence the first children any hive has seen in decades.
“No wonder you and Crane get on,” Jess says. A talker when she’s nervous. “You’re so quiet.”
Stagger grunts at her, which, much like Crane’s own attempts at communication, gets the point across nonetheless.
Crane lifts the dish towel.
It’s…
A baby.
Tiny and curled in on itself, head the size of a billiard ball, bones the size of toothpicks. Squinched pug face. Skin almost see-through but not quite, thin enough to show the organs under paper-thin flesh. And a distended belly, from which hangs a bizarrely swollen string, stained blue and white; a deep-sea creature clamped to its stomach.
It’s not a larva, or a giant maggot.
Just a baby.
It’s only one,onefucking week older than what’s inside him. What he’s carrying is a few ounces lighter, the skin closer to transparentthan translucent. He leans in, tries to make out the details. All the tiny pieces of it.
Though, what if it’s like Stagger? The worms hiding between the tiny organs. Bugs instead of capillaries. Everything is too small to tell with the wrinkly, half-formed skin in the way.
Itcan’tbe normal. Itcan’t be.
Crane reaches into the bag and props up the sad little creature with one hand. It’s warm and uncomfortably soft. Floppy, too. If he pressed his fingers into the cartilage that would have eventually solidified into a rib cage, the same way he’d open an orange, it’d just come apart.
He deserves to know what’s inside him, doesn’t he? It’s the least the hive can give him. A goddamn answer.
He gets his second hand in there and nudges apart the puffy eyelids, then its tiny slit-mouth. Nothing surprising. Only gelatinous eyeballs not yet finished forming, and structures that would have become gums.
Fine. He can’t see the worms through Stagger’s eyes or mouth either. He’s putting his thumbs against the itty-bitty breastbone.
The nail pierces the skin.
Jess shrieks “Crane!” with the panicked shrill of someone catching their dog with a mauled animal and snatches the bag. Stagger’s head snaps up with a snarl. “What the fuck are youdoing?”
Crane doesn’t try to get the bag back, or make a noise in protest, or do anything at all. Even if he spoke, every possible response would make him sound deranged.I was going to open it up and look for worms?That is involuntary-hold levels of bullshit, even with the hive’s sky-high tolerance for deranged behavior. Like, that’s the sort of thing Harry would’ve said before Levi put him down.
But he wants to beg her to give it back. If he opens it up, he can see. He’ll know what’s waiting for him at the end of this. Who cares,anyway? Hannah doesn’t want it, and it can’t feel anything. It’s dead. It won’t care and neither should she.
Jess stares at him. Waiting.
She gets nothing.
Jess says, “Jesus Christ.” Her teeth chatter. “I don’t—oh mygod.What is—” She turns to Stagger. “Move. I’ll bury it.”
Stagger steps away, almost gratefully abandoning the project to return to Crane’s side. Jess doesn’t take the shovel. She gets to her knees in the rotting underbrush and places the bag in between the roots of the tree and scoops the soil back in with her hands. Mud from the rain and smears of dirt cake under her nails.
“I know you don’t like me,” she says.
