Prepare For Scares: A Chilling Excerpt from Andrew Joseph White’s You Weren’t Meant to Be Human

In You Weren’t Meant to Be Human, Andrew Joseph White delivers a raw and visceral body horror that explores the meaning of identity with a healthy dose of scares. The novel arrives on September 9th, so prepare yourself with a chilling excerpt below.

Crane is not the best person to greet a terrified and potentially unwell stranger, but better him than Levi. Levi talks about putting down defectors the same way hunters brag about bagging deer. He drinks too much. He’d been dishonorably discharged and only ever mentioned it to bitch about getting caught; what he did, Crane refuses to ask, but when he comes home with blood on his shirt it’s hard not to mull over the possibilities.

In comparison then, Crane is the safer option. The boyish half-androgyny of twenty months’ testosterone therapy—sparse facial hair, yesterday’s eyeliner, almost-but-not-quite flat-chested and a little too feminine around the mouth—places him squarely in the territory of “not a threat, probably.” It’s just the dead-eyed stare and unblinking silence that throws people off and, well. This person will have to deal with it.

The girl is halfway across the parking lot when Crane steps out to meet her.

She’s barefoot and glassy-eyed, one tank top strap slipping off her dirty shoulder. Hasn’t showered in a while, given the state of her hair. The shitty fluorescent lights make it difficult to tell bruises from shadows. She’s limping too. Feet are bleeding.

She walked here, then. From where? The closest town is a few miles up the mountain, but if she was from Washville, he would’ve recognized her.

She sees him and stops.

He waits a moment to see if she starts talking. She doesn’t.

Down the gravel driveway, on the easternmost stretch of West Virginia Corridor H, a truck grumbles past, headed towards the state line. To one side of them, there’s old forest; one minute’s walk to the other, the condemned livestock exchange. Nobody else for a good long while.

Crane’s stomach hurts. He’d been in her place once, three years ago. Creeping too close to his eighteenth birthday, drunk for the first and only time in his life in the high school parking lot, striking matches and letting them burn out. He’d accepted a spot at a top state school earlier that year—majoring in political communication—and graduated salutatorian that morning. The packing list for his dorm was taped to the fridge, and while his classmates kicked off the rest of their lives at the school-sponsored YMCA grad party, there he was in the dark alone, trying to figure out the logistics of self-immolation.

 All his childhood prayers had fallen through. There’d never been a car accident or building fire to do the hard part for him. Time was up. Childhood was over, the real world was knocking on the door, and he was tired. He was too scared to die but he needed it to stop and it was then or never.

But even after years of fantasizing and hoping and begging God, he still didn’t have the guts to do it.

That’s when the swarm found him. Because that’s what happens: it finds you. By the time it makes you an offer, it already knows you won’t say no, and then you end up in front of a strange building hours from home in the middle of the night with blood in the back of your throat and burns on your fingertips.

Same story every time, it seems.

Crane takes one cautious step forward, then another. The girl in the parking lot wavers, looking warily over her shoulder like she’s thinking of running. Nope. She made her choice. Running won’t do her any good.

He clicks his tongue to get her attention and holds up a bottle of water. Here, the gesture says.

“Who—?” she says, sounding sick like a head cold.

The bottle gets a shake. Come on. For you.

She blinks, then picks her way through the sharp gravel to accept it. It takes a few tries to get the bottle open, but when she does, she sucks it down like she hasn’t had a drop for days. When she has to stop to wheeze for air, she pours some onto her face. She splutters, blinking, and aha, there she is. Wild with hunger and confusion. Alive.

She starts to cry.

He’d cried too.

“Thank you,” she sobs, “thank you,” and Crane stands in the dark, looking past her to the road and rubbing the scar on his wrist, because he can’t stand to look someone in the eye.

If he’d actually gotten the guts to do it that night, to actually set the match to something instead of shaking it out every time the flame licked his fingers, how would it have gone?

His burning—Sophie’s burning, the brown-haired girl in a Forever 21 dress, the sweet female-thing that had existed in Crane’s place for so many years—had been premeditated to a degree worthy of institutionalization. She knew she only wanted the face to burn. That was the most bang for her buck, or more accurately, the most visible damage in the least amount of time. She also knew she was a coward, and did not have the willpower to go up in stoic silence like a monk or the activists lighting themselves up in rows on the Capitol steps. The face was enough; it would have to do.

Maybe she would’ve siphoned gas from the car’s tank to smear across her cheeks, or the liquor she’d been choking down would work. The logistics aren’t important. What’s important was that she burned. The scars would be permanent and she would be free. She’d already written a speech in her notes app for her future doctor, explaining exactly why she didn’t want reconstructive surgery. It’s expensive, she’d say, and extra stress on a delicate part of a human body, and it’s not worth it, and I don’t want you to do it, please don’t fix it, if you fix it I’ll do it again, I’ll do it again I swear I will.

She’d say, I’m sorry I didn’t have the words to say it any other way.

Crane leads the girl inside, turns the OPEN sign to CLOSED, and locks the door. She’s worse up close. White face discolored like it’d been beaten in, fingers bloody and broken-nailed. Her feet track a red-brown mess.

Is Levi still in the office? Thank god. Give her a second to get it together without him.

“Sorry,” she sniffles. “You probably just mopped, too. I’m Jess.”

Crane shrugs, because that statement presumes he isn’t used to cleaning up bodily fluids, and reaches behind the register to bring out the basket. Tammy put it together a decade ago and some of the stuff is still that old: Wet wipes, bandages, Neosporin and tweezers, fresh socks and snacks and dry shampoo and mouthwash.

Jess watches it warily before he nudges it towards her, offers some semblance of permission. She immediately snatches up every calorie she can find.

“Thank you,” she says, hands full of cheap granola bars. “Uh. Can you talk?”

Crane nods.

“Oh.”

It’s been a while since the hive brought in somebody new. Used to be two other guys that worked here, Mike and Harry, but Mike died of mouth cancer and Harry started screaming about botfly larvae and tapeworms in his belly so Levi had to put him down. Cleaning blood and bone pieces off the floor was bad enough, but the impact on Crane’s work schedule for the past few months rubbed salt in the wound. He cannot wait to show this girl how to work the register.

While she finishes her water and demolishes the granola bars, Crane texts his manager, Tammy. Texting doesn’t count as writing things down, as long as it’s a situation in which any normal person would text. Otherwise it’s a no-go. It drives Levi up the wall.

Crane: Got a new one. Let me know when ur up.

That’s followed by, Did u know?

Tammy will get the girl a phone, some clothes, make sure she settles alright in the guest room that used to be Crane’s. Some woman from a Georgia hive will build a fake ID and ship it up in a few weeks. Whoever Jess was before will shrivel away, and a new person will molt—so to speak—into its place. There’s a lot of work to do.

But before any of that, fake IDs or instructions on how to clean the coffee machines, she needs to put food in her stomach and get those feet to stop bleeding.

Crane gives her the milk crate he sits on for slow shifts and she slumps onto it, hoisting up a foot to assess the damage. Not as bad as it could be; more mud than blood, what with summer rains coming through the mountain. He cracks open another water bottle to soak a paper towel and presses it into her hands. Clean up.

Her face nags at him, to the point he starts chewing on his lip ring. She’s familiar in a way he can’t put his finger on.

“Um.” Scrubbing her feet, Jess takes stock of her surroundings: the cramped sales floor, dirty coffee machines, cigarettes behind the counter. She’s adaptable, then. Even struggling through tears, she’s trying to keep a cool head. Good. “What’s your name? Can you write it down?”

“His name’s Crane.”

Jess whips around with a yelp. It’s just Levi though, leaning against the door to the employee area, nonchalantly pulling a cigarette from the pack and popping it in his mouth. Jess studies him. The muscles in her neck are taut.

“Like the bird?” she says.

“He’s a mute. He ain’t silent or nothing, makes all kinds of noise when you get him going—” He grins, using the beat of silence to produce a cheap lighter and get the flame going. Crane’s face burns. “But besides that, good luck getting a word out of him. I’m Levi. You smoke?”

“No.”

Crane doesn’t make a habit of smoking either, but he still makes a low noise in the back of his throat and holds out a hand. Even an inconsiderate roommate-slash-fuckbuddy-slash-boyfriend-is-too-strong-a-word-but-the-closest-they-have like Levi catches the drift. He comes over to place a fresh cigarette in Crane’s mouth and lights it with the gruff homoerotic flair only possessed by ex-soldiers, cocking an eyebrow at the door.

We’re gonna finish what we started, right?

Crane breathes in so the flame catches. Of course they are.

Levi, content with that answer, snaps his lighter shut and slings an arm over Crane’s shoulder. “So. You look like shit, missy. Where you walk from?”

“My boyfriend’s place,” she says cautiously. “On the other side of the lumberyard.”

Five miles as the crow flies; longer if she stuck to roads. Hell of a trek to make with no shoes. Still doesn’t explain why Crane’s never seen her, though.

“This about him?” Levi says.

Jess hesitates, but nods.

“We can work with that. You need anything?”

Jess inspects her fucked-up hands. The worms or flies don’t give a shit about morals, but it doesn’t seem like this boyfriend of hers will be missed any.

She says, “Can—can I see them? I want to say thank you.”

Of course, Crane thinks. He’d wanted to see them too; an animal desperation to meet the first things to understand him, no matter how horrific they were. So he helps her to her feet, steadying her when she hisses in pain, and Levi takes the key from under the register, and together they walk her across the sales floor to the hall, to the manager’s office, to the heavy iron door set into the dark back wall.

Jess holds tight to Crane’s arm.

Levi fights with the lock for a moment, muttering under his breath before it gives way, and.

Oh child, the hive says with its thousand chattering jaws and the buzzing of a thousand wings; the flesh flies swarming in thick mats, the wet bodies of soft worms hiding in piles of regurgitated bone-pulp. The smell is revolting. Our cherished one, hello, hello, hello.

As if only half-aware of what she’s doing, Jess takes one step forward, then another. Crane, out of instinct, or maybe like a child, covers the scar on his wrist. He still remembers the sting, how for a moment he thought the worm would dig itself into his arm and never come out.

You’ve made it. You are safe. You are home.

Levi takes Jess by the arm and turns his own hand to show the ugly mark bitten into his skin. “Look at that,” he says. “You’re gonna get your own. Hold out your—there we go. Don’t flinch. You can take it.”

A singular, dripping worm extricates itself from the mass. Jess breathes in and nearly chokes on the rotting stink.

When it bites down, she only screams a little.

You will feel the sun on your face when we cannot.