Page 16 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
Crane hesitated in the doorway and Levi noticed, mouthed,Hey, baby.
“Dunno how picky your worms are,” he continued, “if they get territorial or whatever.”
“Worms,”the woman on the other side of the line groused. Her scratchy voice was audible through the phone speaker, a side effect of Levi’s combined affinity for shotguns and disregard for ear protection.“The lot of you are so disrespectful.”
“They’reworms,” Levi snorted. “Tammy thought you wanted him back. Do you? Or can I shut him up?”
The Tennessee hive mother did not want him back. Levi shrugged, hung up, and started running the tap because driving this guy out into the wilderness to put him down would take too much time and waste expensive ammo. Plus, drowning makes the least mess.
“Help me with this,” Levi said as the defector—who couldn’t have been older than nineteen, Crane’s age then—started to clue into why, even through the fever of blood loss and pain, freezing water was hitting his cheek. “He’s got some fight in him.”
Crane doesn’t remember how the drowning went. What he does remember is burning muscles and the slip of hands against wet skin,and then stepping out of the tub and Levi shoving him hard against the bathroom wall.
The body was still warm in the water when Crane wiped away the face-fucked slurry of spit and cum that’d smeared down his chin, stained his shirt, left him coughing and crying. “There we go,” Levi had said, scooping up the mess with two fingers and shoving it back into Crane’s mouth. “That’s a good boy.”
See?We kill you.
On the stairs of Aspen and Birdie’s house, Crane thinks, a fly must have followed him to Virginia. Or there’s a hive creeping away from the mountains and closer to cities, real population centers, that caught scent of him in the suburbs. He stares at this man—this man with a swarm lodged in his throat. Thisthing, whatever he is, that shouldn’t exist. As far as Crane knows.
He wasn’t running. He was going to come home.
He’ll come home now, actually. Right now. Promise. Swear it.
Just don’t go upstairs.
Just give him a second to make it believable.
Crane gets the time he needs, because the worms and the flies and the hive and the swarm are nothing if not understanding. The man watches, waiting, as Crane fetches his clothes from the laundry, resets the back door the best he can, and shoves his feet hard into his shoes. Aspen and Birdie will be confused when they wake up. Paranoid too, when they notice the lock broken. That’s okay. As long as they’re safe, as long as they don’t try to follow. They don’t know where he lives. He’s never given them a town; he’s never even given them a county.
He leaves a note, too. It’s simple.Sorry.Then he spends a moment considering a wholedon’t come looking for mespiel, before deciding that’d just make it worse.
The note goes onto the coffee table, between a candle and a copy ofThe Little Engine That Could.
What are the chances that Crane has already crossed the line? Already branded himself a defector by stepping foot in this cluttered house and sleeping in the warm bed upstairs? Given how desperately the hive tears its traitors apart, this whole “killing himself” thing might be moot. Oh shit, would Levi be the one to do it? As he takes one look back at the living room, one final inspection to make sure it’s all in place, he reviews everything he knows about Levi and tries to decide whether his not-really-boyfriend would insist on being the one to uphold the rules.
As he steps out onto the sidewalk, he fails to come to any kind of conclusion. Levi doesn’t love Crane—Crane doesn’t love Levi either—though he likes to think they’ve ended up with a semi-sentimental attachment to each other, the same way you grow fond of a stray cat in the neighborhood.
But the hive will understand. Right? If he tells the hive he’s pregnant, they’ll understand why he panicked. He’ll apologize and they’ll fix the problem together and it’ll be okay.
He’s leaving the house. He’s doing what he’s told. He’s good at that. It’s the only thing he’s good at.
It’ll be fine.
The strange man follows.
The strange man walks oddly, stiffly, as if his body isn’t quite his and it’s taking some getting used to. He trails Crane like a herding dog. The streetlights glow, and at the mouth of the neighborhood cul-de-sac, a car drives by on a late-night errand.
Aspen and Birdie and Luna are safe. That’s what he focuses on, because that’s what matters. He did the right thing.
Crane unlocks the Camry and gets in. Is he allowed to be proud ofhow well he’s keeping it together? With how prone he was to meltdowns and tantrums and anxiety attacks as a kid, this is an improvement. The repetitive numbness ofam I going to die soon, I didn’t mean it I was going to come back, the hive has to understand—that’s better than the alternative of losing his shit.
Aspen would correct him: no, this is calleddissociation. Or a complete removal from the survival instinct, which is in and of itself a form of suicidality. Both are bad.
The man with the swarm in his throat drops into the shotgun seat and swings the door shut.
Silence.
Quiet, except for the blood in Crane’s ears and the air in his lungs. The creak of body weight and the shuffling of clothes. He’s been wearing this outfit for over twenty-four hours now. The shirt has taken on the distinct over-warmth of clothing kept too close to the body for too long.
