Page 50 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
This son of a bitch. With his dog tags and the angry tic in his jaw.
Fuck him.Fuck him.
“Would you look at that,” Levi says. He pulls a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and shoots a glance to Irene, whose expression is so smug it almost sends Crane reeling. “Even came out to meet us.”
Levi is smiling.
Twenty
In the truck, parked in the grass in front of Tammy’s house, Levi holds Crane by the arm. “Stay.”
Irene walks Jess up to the porch and bangs on Tammy’s door. The gray Accord grumbles in the driveway. Jess’s jeans are stained red.
Through the windshield, Crane watches. He watches Tammy yank open the door. The horror dawning on her face. Irene shoving the car keys into her hands.
Stagger isn’t here. That’s not to say he hadn’t tried to follow; he had. He’d grabbed Levi by the shirt and slammed him into the door, but unfortunately Levi isn’t the one with worms in his brain. Levi saidhe wouldn’t tell the hive that Stagger let Crane leave the apartment if he backed up, right now. And Crane took Stagger’s hand and pulled him and pulled him until he listened.I’ll be fine, I’ll be okay, I get one mistake and you don’t, you don’t get to fucking die and leave me alone. I won’t let you.
So he stayed because Crane asked, and now Crane is alone.
At least Levi gives him one of the cigarettes. Crane is shivering like he’s fighting off cold chills, his back tense from muscle contractions. He has trouble lighting it and Levi refuses to do it for him. When it finally catches and he breathes out, smoke trickles out from between grit teeth.
Is Levi the one who knocked up Hannah?
Did the hivetellhim to?
That can’t be correct. If they did, then Hannah and Jess would’ve been struggling with the same draconian bullshit Crane’s been cracking under for months. The hive doesn’t leave things up to chance. The hive doesn’t take risks like that.
The hive tells Tammy to stop checking on their girls, and this is what happens.
As Tammy raises her voice at Irene, “Why the fuck didn’t you leave her in the goddamn car,” Levi starts the truck up again and pulls out onto the gravel road. Wind whistles through the crack in the window meant to let out the smoke. The sun won’t rise for another hour now.
Levi gave him one slipup. It’s going to be okay.
Without taking his eyes off the road, Levi produces Crane’s phone and sticks it into the center console’s cupholder.
He says, “Your taste in porn is bizarre.”
Crane does not respond, not like he usually would—no grunt of acknowledgment, no snort of annoyance. He’s running on autopilot, breathing and blinking and not much else. Most of all, he has no idea what Levi is talking about, or why he would bring this up.
“Sure, the weird BDSM stuff I get,” Levi says. “I know what you’re like. But…” Crane runs through what’s in his search history—the entirety of the gangbang and anal tags on XVideos; sadism scenes that always left him feeling gross even though he wanted to be the girl in those videos, not the sadist. Levi changes his mind and plucks the cigarette from Crane’s mouth because Crane must be paying too much attention to something that isn’t him. “That AI-generated dog-fucker stuff is next level. I knew you had issues, but Jesus.”
It’s not often that Crane hates being autistic, but he does now. His brain feels like a tire spinning in the mud.
Levi frustratedly flicks the cigarette out the open window as they pull onto Corridor H. “Irene knows how to crack phones. She’s got a whole program for it and everything.”
No.
Crane snatches up his phone. He ignores his search history and his Notes and his photos, every other embarrassing or incriminating thing, and fumbles into his messages.
Levi couldn’t have, he wouldn’t, he said in the parking lot that he’d look the other way, that it was water under the bridge—
“We spent some time asking around,” he continues, “but we never did manage to track down any friends named Aspen or Birdie. They ain’t with a hive, are they?” They both already know the answer. “They’ve got a kid and everything. I knew you were slow, and that’s fine, I don’t got a problem with that, but I didn’t think you werestupid.”
The messages load. The latest one is from earlier this morning, three a.m.
Levi did a good job—the texts sent from Crane’s phone read almost like Crane himself. Not perfect, of course, but close enough in cadence and grammar that Aspen and Birdie wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
Crane, but not really, not actually him:sorry
