Page 27 of Spread Me
With all the will she possesses, Kinsey takes a step forward, out of Saskia’s arms. “I can’t.”
Saskia takes a step too, wraps herself around Kinsey tighter than before. “You can.” She covers Kinsey’s eyes with the hand that has fingers, reaches around to let thetongue trace a circle around one of Kinsey’s nipples. Without the heat of a mouth to warm it, the tongue is cold. It leaves a wet trail of chilled spit behind to pinch at Kinsey’s breast. Saskia clutches Kinsey close, grinds against her, bites down on her earlobe—it’s overwhelming, too much all at once, and Kinsey can’t help letting out a throaty moan. “That’s better,” Saskia breathes. “Just don’t look. It’s better if you don’t look. I understand that now. I made a mistake with Domino, but now I know—”
That name is what finally snaps Kinsey back to herself. She jerks away from Saskia—from the thing that’s pretending to be Saskia, she reminds herself like a slap to the face—and bolts for the door.
“Wait—”
“No,” Kinsey says, scooping up her clothes as she skids across the lab on bare feet, sand crunching under her heels, red light at her back. She doesn’t look behind her because she knows that if she does, she won’t be able to resist whatever she sees. “No, you killed Domino, you—you killed Saskia—”
“Wait!!” The lichen yells with Saskia’s voice, chases Kinsey with Saskia’s feet. It’s fast—easily as fast as Kinsey, maybe faster. But this rejection has taken it by surprise. Kinsey’s out the door before it’s halfway across the lab.
She slams the door shut behind her and leans her full weight against it, panting, clutching her clothes to her chest, staring at the wall that still screams with a smothering wind that’s pressing dunes of sand against the base with every passing moment. She can’t decide if she hates herself for nearly giving in, or if she hates herself for missing her chance. Her skin puckers in the chill of the hallway.It’s not a problem if we don’t make it a problem,Saskia had said.
It made so much sense when she said it. And nowKinsey has confirmation of what she suspected before: the virus wants her. It sees her, exactly the way she sees it, and it wants to be with her.
The door at Kinsey’s back doesn’t have an exterior lock. The handle rattles, the door shoves against her back hard. Saskia—the creature—wants out. It takes all Kinsey’s strength to keep it trapped inside. It takes all her will not to dive back into that room with it.
She knows better than to trust herself to resist it. She screams for help, competing with the wind outside. She hopes her team hears her and comes to her rescue—and just as powerfully, she hopes the thing inside the lab will break the door down, pin her to the floor of the hallway, and push that long ropy tongue into her as deep as it can go. She screams, pressing her thighs together to stop herself from dripping with need. She screams and screams and screams.
It’s only once Mads arrives that she realizes she’s been screaming Saskia’s name.
It’s too cold outside at night for a picnic to make any sense, but everyone comes out with Mads anyway. They spread out four of Saskia’s knitted blankets on the sand a quarter mile from the station.
Domino brings the big pot from the canteen; when they take off the lid, a cloud of steam rises into the air. It’s a dish Domino calls Big Noodle, a combination of seven different flavors of instant ramen with a whole bag of frozen vegetables thrown in during the boil. It smells like shrimp and chicken and beef all at once. The tiny cubes of soft carrot stand out against the salt slap of the noodles. Everyone eats out of the pot at once, their forks diving past each other like swooping vultures. No one speaks.
Then Kinsey opens a bottle of wine and hands it to Mads. They look down at it in silence for a minute or two, their hand engulfing the narrow glass neck. Then they raise it high into the air.
“Five years ago,” they begin. Their voice is quiet, but the entire desert is so still tonight that it seems like the ear of the world is pressed to Mads’s sternum. “Five years ago tonight, I lost track of time. I was at my practice, catching up on paperwork and fucking around on my phone and just kind of… I don’t know. Probably watching videos or some shit. And when I finally got home, the only person there was this young cop. He was waiting for me on the porch. He looked, I don’t know, maybe eighteen?” They look out across the dark desert. “He looked scared to tell me what he had to tell me. I remember thinking,I can’t believe they sent you to do this alone.”
Saskia reaches out and rests a hand on Mads’s shoulder. They reach up and press their palm over her knuckles, hard enough that Kinsey can’t tell if they’re holding her in place or pushing her away.
“And then he told me what he had to tell me. He gave me the alone-ness. He’d been there alone, and then he handed it off to me, and suddenly, I was the one who was alone. And he went back to wherever baby cops go, and I stayed on my front porch and watched the stars come out, because I couldn’t make myself go inside and see how alone I was,” Mads says.
They raise the wine bottle high overhead, then take a long drink from it. They cough a few times. “I don’t feel that way here. I don’t get a moment’s fucking peace from any of you,” they add, laughing. And then they raise thebottle high again. “Thank you all for not making me be alone out here tonight.”
They drink again, then pass the bottle. Mads will stay out here in the cold until the sun comes up, and everyone will stay with them.
Mads drapes a blanket around Kinsey’s shoulders. She’s on the couch in the little nook outside the exam room. She can’t stop shivering. The rest of the team heard her screams and came to her rescue—Mads held the exam room door shut while Jacques and Nkrumah moved bookshelves to form a makeshift barricade. While they did that, Kinsey got dressed, and the entire time, she listened to the sound of Saskia calling her name from within the lab.
Even though she ran—even though she called for help and got it, even though she’s shaking with fear—she can’t help the yearning that’s blooming just beneath the surface of her skin. Everything she’s ever wanted is behind two thin walls on either side of her. Domino in the exam room, Saskia in the lab. Everything in her is taut with desire.
She bites the inside of her cheek hard, grips the knittedblanket in one fist. Forces herself to think of the cost of getting what she wants. Two of her colleagues are dead. Two of her friends. Nothing, she tells herself, could fuck her well enough to make that acceptable.
“So,” Mads says, tucking the blanket around Kinsey a little tighter.
“So,” she replies. “Saskia’s the same as Domino. She had a tongue on her hand.”
“A what?”
“A tongue,” she repeats. “Instead of fingers.”
Mads goes quiet. When Kinsey looks over, she catches them frowning down at their own fingers, flexing the knuckles. She’s about to offer to check their thumb for tastebuds when the wind outside suddenly dies.
The quiet that falls is as jarring as the howling that’s been surrounding the base for the past several hours. Mads and Kinsey and Jacques all look up at the ceiling, the same way they do when the wind begins. They’re all waiting for the other shoe to drop—for the wind to pick back up, twice as loud, or for a thunderclap to announce that a lightning storm is splitting the dust storm open like a wedge splitting a seam into a mountainside.
“Fuck,” Nkrumah whispers. “If she’s infected, that means we can’t go into the lab.”
“Not like we’ve got samples to study anyway,” Mads says.
