Page 39 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
Crane flattens out the napkin and tries his best to draw.
The caricatures in the back of the Burger King or Denny’s were nevergood.Sophie liked to consider herself an artist, spent her younger years filling notebook after notebook with doodles, but by high school she was too exhausted by advanced classes and community service clubs and college applications to keep up with it beyond the odd art elective. Her main weakness had been line confidence, and it shows. Crane’s drawing is sketchy and a bit of a mess. He blames it on the lackluster medium.
Still, it does the job. He nails Hannah’s braid, her tiny shoulders, the upturned nose that makes her look a bit like a pixie. After a spot of hesitation, sure, he adds the swell of her belly and exaggerates it to get the point across.
He slides it across the table.
Levi narrows his eyes, pulls the napkin closer. “Is that—huh. Hannah Baskin, McDowell hive. Right?”
Then, “She’s pregnant too?”
Crane starts to nod, then stops. Sucks on his teeth. Shrugs. She’s not anymore, if that’s what he’s asking.
“Christ.”
There it is again. The tic in his jaw. Looking like something is crawling underneath him, working its way into the spaces between the skin and the muscle and the bone where it doesn’t belong. Crane can imagine what the hive said to Levi when he walked into the gas station at some point during the past few hours—the ex-soldierfurious and seething, stumbling into the office of his superior officer, fired up and needing a direction in which to explode, only to be told to be calm and quiet and still.
You touch the carrier of our little one,they must have said,and we will devour you alive.
If Levi actually intended on apologizing, he’d give Crane what he wants. Fuck pregnancy cravings and half-hearted restitution, whatever this trip was. Push him hard into the wall. Shove fingers down his throat until he gags. Buckle a belt around his neck and fasten it way too tight. Let him be a man and take something. He doesn’t care what. Just let him take it.
But he’s no different from Hannah, is he.
They finish their food in silence. Crane is somehow angrier than he’d been twenty-four hours ago, and a hundred times more exhausted.
Sixteen
The tail end of the graveyard shift rush—or the closest thing this gas station ever gets to a rush—isn’t the best time to clean out a pair of wallets stolen out of the pockets of corpses, but pausing to take a breather isn’t an option. If Crane keeps moving, keeps working until exhaustion numbs his hands and leaves him unsteady, he won’t think about what Tammy said, or what Jess said, or what Levi said, or what the hive said, or anything at all.
Eleven thirty p.m. The floor has been swept, coffee refreshed, register double-checked, expired food on the shelves removed. Staggersits behind the counter with his eyes barely open as Crane peels open the Velcro on the first wallet.
Driver’s license (organ donor, fitting). Social Security card (good for opening fraudulent lines of credit). Two credit cards (equally good for running up before someone at the bank catches it). Fifty dollars in bills. A phone number written on the back of a mechanic’s receipt. An expired coupon for a Butterball turkey.
Crane nicks the cash—score—and sorts the rest into zippered folders for Tammy to pick up later.
So. As far as he could tell, Hannah’s baby was normal.
Did he think that the poor girl was going to give birth to the Eraserhead baby? No, of course not. (Kind of.) (Turns out twenty-week fetuses do actually kind of look like the Eraserhead baby if you squint, tilt your head, and are a horrible person.) But a monster would at least make sense. A baby doesn’t even have the decency to mean anything. It’s a baby. When it comes down to it, a baby is a chemical reaction that’s gotten out of control.
He’s thinking again. Not good. He goes for the second wallet, a nice leather one with initials stamped into the corner. Another driver’s license, a nickel, a photo of a preteen boy on a swing, a Maryland EBT card. Boring.
What does the hive want with a baby? That’s the thing he can’t get over—as if he can get over any of it, as if he hasn’t been ruminating over every loose end he’s stumbled across for the past few months, driving himself crazy rehashing every last detail he can remember, over and over and over like suddenly it’ll make sense once he finds the right connection. He doesn’twantto be doing this. The last time he thought too hard he tried to set himself on fire.
If there was any kind god in the universe, Crane would’ve been born in the fifties, when he would have spent his life after eighteenblitzed out of his mind on tranquilizers like a good housewife, or have his brain scrambled by a lobotomy, and okay, he doesn’twant that, he doesn’t, he swears, it’s—it’d be easier, though, wouldn’t it? Fuck the cerebral cortex. Animals don’t have meltdowns about doing their reproductive duty. Animals get fucked and eat the babies if they decide they don’t want them after the fact.
He’s being mentally ill about this. He shoves the wallet under the counter and sets aside a carton of Marlboro Reds, since Levi will want it when he swings by, but rips open the side and digs out a pack and produces a single cigarette.
He only ever smokes when Levi does, and sometimes not even then. It tastes awful and the nicotine buzz makes him feel funny—he doesn’t even like being tipsy, only ever drank the one time in the back of the car after graduation and never looked at a bottle again. The only thing smoking has going for it is the way Levi looks at him when he lights the cigarette.
Still, something he’ll hate sounds perfect right now. Crane grabs a purple Bic from the display beside the leave-a-penny, puts the cigarette into his mouth the way Levi does, and frustratedly attempts to get the lighter to light.
Maybe he needs to go back out to the woods in the dark. Dig up the corpse. Open the bag and see if the worms on the inside have chewed their way out.
The bell above the door rings.
Shit. The cigarette tumbles out of his mouth. He tries to catch it, but it ends up on the counter.
“Oh,” says the lady from the Dollar General as she comes in with an apologetic smile. “Ain’t nobody told you those’re bad for the baby?”
