Page 81 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
There is no way out of this. He swallows down bile, and he’s shaking again. He just keepsshaking.As long as she’s alive, the hive will look for her. He cannot destroy every worm, he cannot kill every fly and every hidden maggot in every dark corner in West Virginia. She will never be safe. She will never be allowed to grow up happy or whole, because the hive will always want her and her body and her ability to create more peoplejust like her.
“Give her to me,” Levi says.
Crane presses his face against her cheek, tucks his head against her shoulder. She knows who he is. She knows his smell, the texture of his skin, the rhythm of his breathing.
If the world was better, he could bring her to Aspen and Birdie’s doorstep and collapse there, push her into their arms and beg them to keep her away from him. All he’ll ever be able to see in her is Levi and everything he did, and that is so unimaginably cruel. Or he could take his parents up on the offer. Mom always did want grandkids. Maybe she’d be okay raising her without him. All he’d have to do is ask, and his parents would tilt the world off its axis to help.
It would be beautiful, if that was possible.
But it’s not. She can survive the infestation. She can carry the worms and not be eaten alive from the inside out. Just like Levi. Shewill be broken down into the same breeding bitch they made out of Crane, because that is what she was born to be.
Crane needs to do the right thing for once in his life. His silence may be consent, but hers is not. He remembers—his face pressed to his daughter’s skin, watching the wretched hive wait in baited silence—that up until the, what, late 1980s? Doctors thought newborns couldn’t feel pain. Or didn’t have the capability to remember it after the fact. And so they performed surgery on them without anesthesia, only muscle relaxers to paralyze them.
If Levi opened her up to cram a beast inside her, she would feel every agonizing moment of it.
Do the right thing.
It’s the only kindness he’s ever been capable of giving.
Thirty-Four
There’s no other way to do it. Nothing else that will work, nothing that can’t be stopped. Nothing that makes her a part of him again, that lets him save her and keep her all at once.
Crane devours her.
The most merciful spot is the jugular. Right under the delicate skin of the throat. His daughter squawks pathetically for a single ear-splitting second—how could anyone have thought they don’t feel pain, how couldanyone—before what’s happening rips beyond her capacity to experience it. The skin tears and the veins pop between his teeth and the blood fills his mouth, pours down his chin, chokeshim with the sudden heat and salt. He swallows it. The chunk of flesh that comes off in his mouth, the tough stringy arteries, the cartilage that hasn’t hardened yet. It clogs his throat and lodges in his esophagus. He forces it down. His body revolts, attempts to regurgitate it, but he won’t let himself lose any of the meat, not one shred of it. It’s hers. He made her and he won’t let them have her, she’s his she’s his she’shis.
Thirty-Five
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
His daughter has stopped moving. He holds her against his chest like he can turn his rib cage into her tiny grave.
Tammy screams.
WE SAVED YOU, WE MADE YOU, UNGRATEFUL FUCKING BEAST, AND THIS IS HOW YOU REPAY US?
And Crane is laughing. He won, motherfucker. She will never know what it’s like to be scared, she will never have that bite on the inside of her wrist, she will never know the crunching of feeding worms or the betrayal of a body becoming something it wasn’t meant to be. They’llnever be able to hurt her. He is naked on the floor, thighs smeared with afterbirth and bare chest dripping with gore. His stomach is hollow and sagging. He’s laughing.
Fuck you.
Levi is the first to get his shit together.
He lunges for the baby, a feverish snarling attempt to wrestle the ragdoll-limp thing out of Crane’s arms as if there’s a possibility he can save it, reverse the damage, offer it to the hive anyway. But Stagger catches him. Hits Levi like a bull. Stagger the protector. Stagger the loyal, terrified man with worms crawling in between the folds of his gray matter. He slams them both into the door with the dullclangof bone on metal, and they fall to the ground. Stagger has Levi’s head between both his giant gloved hands. Squeezing. Going to pop him like a piece of rotten fruit.
Up, get up. He has to get up. Crane can’t get his legs under him, can barely move them. If he couldn’t see, he would’ve guessed somebody had taken a chain saw to his cunt, ripped it open navel to tailbone. He fumbles away, drags himself backward. Baby held to his chest. Once. Twice.
He bumps into Tammy, who is hunched over with her breakfast splattered on her shoes. Her eyes are blown with panic. Froth gathers at the corner of her mouth. He’s never seen her panic before; Crane didn’t think she was capable of it. She’s gotten pissed, she’s gotten mad as hell, but she’s been alive as long as him three times over. She’s not supposed to be this scared.
It takes Crane until that moment to realize that what he did was insane.
But it wasn’t. It was the clearest, sanest decision he’d ever made.
“You—” she gasps.
Levi grabs the shotgun. Racks it.
Stagger bashes Levi’s head against the door, and the shot goes wide.
