Page 7 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
The fuck is she talking about. She can’t? The hive chose her for a reason. The flies wouldn’t have crawled into this room as a horrible shimmering mass and coated the walls and buzzed in a disgusting cacophony if they didn’t wanther. Now she’s here, they saved her, and hives don’t appreciate it when their chosen people don’t return the favor.
He gets up. Takes his foot off the worm-food. Grabs her.
She makes the smallest, most terrified sound he’s ever heard.
It’s not happening, he realizes. He can’t force her—and if he does and it cracks something in her, shatters an irreplaceable piece of her psyche, then he’s not going to be the one to put her down. No way in hell.
Fine. He’ll do it himself.
To her credit, Jess doesn’t think she can get away with not watching it happen. She’s plastered herself to the threshold, fingertips resting perfectly along the claw marks marring the splotchy wood, but she does not turn away. Her eyes are trained on the hammer and the place it will come down.
Aspen and Birdie would be disgusted with Crane if they knew.
Crane hoists a leg over the man on the bedroom floor, puts all his weight on the back of the neck, and brings the clawed end of the hammer down twice.
Four
Jess, apparently, processes her feelings out loud.
Crane already has a stomachache and has spent the past few minutes developing a gross knot of nausea in the crux of his throat. Now, on top of checking his rearview for stray cops wandering in from the next county over and staring daggers at the speedometer—commit only one crime at a time, never crack forty-five while there’s a body in the trunk—he has a headache too.
He puts the collar of his shirt into his mouth to pick at a thread that’s come loose from the stitching. Sure, murder would make anyonenervous. He can’t fault Jess for handling it in a way that happens to be annoying.
But he cannot deal with this right now.
“And this is normal for you?” Jess asks, addressing Crane for the first time since she started talking. “You’re used to this?”
Well, yes. Mike and Levi made sure of that. Getting locked in the trunk of a car with a corpse in the middling heat of a West Virginia summer, with all the choking death-stink, Levi with a timer and Mike sitting on the trunk to keep it closed—that would do the trick.
What had Mike said when he pulled Crane out of that trunk by the hair?“The hive’s got no use for scared little girls.”
In the grand scheme of things, Crane is being downright kind.
Jess scrubs a hand over her face, tugs at her cheeks, squeezes her nose like she’s trying to get feeling back in her body. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. It’s just that—you didn’t hesitate. Sean’s dead. You just did it. Oh my god. Okay.”
Crane doesn’t look at her, just huffs, hopes the message that comes across is,Of course I did.
Jess says, “And what happens if I can’t do it? If I decide nope, I’m out, I take it back?”
Crane hits the brakes.
The Camry screeches to a halt at a red light, the only stoplight in Wash County, where it’s just them in front of the Dollar General. The lumberyard looms in the distance.
A single sentence in the Notes of Crane’s phone:We kill you.
He shows it to her. He looks at her like,Do you see this? Do you understand what you’ve agreed to?Was the swarm unclear, was the bite on your wrist not enough to drive the point home?
Would you rather be in that house, with that man, with whatever he did to you?
Would you rather be out there in the world alone?
No. Of course not.
The light turns green.
“I wasn’t going to,” Jess says weakly. “I just wanted to ask.”
He shouldn’t be such a bitch. Think about what the man on the bedroom floor—Sean, apparently, as if he deserves a name—must have done to her to put her in the path of a hive. To make her face down the swarm of white-striped, red-eyed flesh flies crawling in through the gaps of her makeshift prison cell, swallowing the walls and popcorn ceiling with that mind-killing hum:
