Page 41 of Spread Me
She shakes her head. “Please.”
“I don’t understand.” The barest hint of frustration enters Domino’s voice. They shimmy down the wall more, reach out to grasp the doorframe with long, flat fingers. “There’s nowhere you love more than this. There’s nobody you want more than me. Tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you. This doesn’t have to be hard.”
The doorknob behind Kinsey rattles.
“Give us a minute,” Domino calls. “You’ll let them in, won’t you, Kinsey?”
Kinsey forces herself to look away from Domino. The stack of keycards digs into the soft meat of her fingers—she grips them until they creak, terrified of dropping them before she has a chance to unlock the exterior door. She whips the flashlight from corner to corner, looking for something she can use. The flickering beam falls on abandoned clothes and boots, notebooks and detritus, none of it heavy or sharp or useful at all.
“I’m not letting you leave,” Domino says behind her. “Not until you tell me why you don’t want to stay. And don’t say it’s to warn people. That’s a lie, and we both know it.”
Kinsey turns back to them, and this time, she points the flashlight beam directly onto them.
The light illuminates the fullness of what they’ve become. It’s a perfect, massive facsimile of the lichen’s microscopic structure. Arms and legs frill around a wide net of body parts, lips and labia and nipples and ears all strung together across a sticky web of flesh. Lacelike fingers and toes tassel out to stick the creature to the wall. Grains of sand and pearly beads of moisture collect at the places where the long strands of skin intersect. Kinsey can’t tell if the liquid is sweat or tears or plasma or pure slick pleasure. The creature’s musk fills the airlock, more invasive and inescapable with every second, and Kinsey understands whatit tried to tell her when it was pretending to be Domino. She can taste it on the air, just as it swore it could taste her. She can taste its desire. Her tongue curls inside her mouth, seeking more even as she desperately searches for a means of escape.
The creature has spread itself across the door, and it watches Kinsey, waiting patiently for her reply. The doorknob rattles again. “One more minute,” Domino calls.
“Why?!” The voice on the other side of the door is Saskia’s, and it’s impatient.
“Go let them in,” Domino murmurs. “They want you. I want you.”
“But I don’t want this,” Kinsey hisses.
“Bullshit.” It draws itself inward even further, consolidating the matrix of flesh into a tighter mesh. “Of course you want me. I can feel it, Kinsey. And—and I saw you,” they add.
Kinsey shakes her head. “Saw—?”
The head that wears Domino’s face rotates. It stretches toward her, sand hissing off it in streams. “I saw the way you looked at me when you brought me inside. I saw the way you blushed when I looked back at you. I heard you fucking yourself, over and over again, while I was making my home inside your colleagues. I felt the way you responded when I touched you. Kinsey, come on,” it pleads. “Stop playing this game.”
She wets her lips. “I don’t want this,” she says softly. The thing between her and the door opens its mouth, but she cuts it off. “No, don’t—don’t interrupt. I’m telling you the truth, and I want you to tell the others, too. This—all of this,” she adds, gesturing behind her to include the creature with Mads’s body, the thing that’s shaped like Nkrumah, the remains of Jacques’s corpse. “I don’t want it.”
“But—”
“I wantyou,” she says, and saying it feels like ripping a fishhook out of the root of her own tongue. “I want you as you are. I don’t want this, this, this—” She can’t find a word for it, settles for simply holding out a hand toward the mess that wears her dead colleagues’ tongues and cocks and cunts like jewelry. “I know you’re trying your hardest to be what I want. I know you think I’m some kind of puzzle to be solved. But I’m not that. I don’t want tricks and surprises and new shapes. I don’t want to feel like I’m fucking someone else!” She’s yelling now, her eyes burning with angry tears. She’s never fought with a lover before. It’s awful and it’s wonderful, the truth carving its way free of her on a wave of strange hot fury. “I don’t want Saskia or Domino or Mads! I’ve never wanted them!”
“Kinsey,” the thing on the wall ventures, but Kinsey’s momentum is too powerful and she cuts it off again.
“If I wanted them, I would have fucked them! You stupid fuckingthing!” She swings at it with the flashlight, misses. “I’ve never fucked myself thinking about them, I’ve never lost sleep over them, why would you think Iwantthem when I only wantyou!” She swings again, catches a strand of flesh with the very end of the flashlight. There’s a snag and a snap and the creature releases a strained cry of pain. “You think you saw me? You don’t know what you saw! I looked at you and felt something real, and I knew we couldn’t be together, I knew you couldn’t ever want me back, and I was okay with it! I was used to it! But this?” She lets out a laugh, feels the spill of tears on her cheeks. “This is worse than nothing. You’ve given me everythingbutwhat I want. You’ve made a grotesque fucking joke of what we could have been. I don’t want this,” she says one last time. “I. Want. To.Leave.”
With that, she swings the flashlight at them again. This time she hits center mass. The heavy metal of the flashlight strikes the dense web of tissue. Domino screams, a piercing shriek like wind whipping through the desert at night, a coyote-howl of pain. Kinsey wrenches her arm back and then swings again, tearing through the network of flesh. No, she realizes—it only seems like flesh. It’s a close facsimile, but the fungus can’t repair itself fast enough to disguise the spongy give of densely connected hyphae.
She swings the flashlight again and again, pounding the creature in front of her until it hangs in shreds, and it’s only when the thing stops screeching that she realizes she’s screaming, too.
“I don’t want you,” Kinsey replies breathlessly. “Not any of you. Not after what you’ve done.” She feels behind her back, groping her way through the mash that’s left of Domino until her hand finds the stripe of metal that is the exterior door handle.
“You’re making a mistake,” a voice says from behind the interior door. “There’s nothing for you out there.”
She shakes her head, pressing the stack of keycards to the reader until it flashes green. “That’s where you’re wrong.” And with that, she opens the door and flees the station, her feet pounding against the sand as she makes her way to the Jeep, to the desert.
To freedom.
Only half the lights are on in Sweet Ramona’s. It’s the end of the night. The team has taken over the long, scarred table in the middle of the room. Ramona herself approaches with a tray of shots—something dark and bitter that no one ordered.
“Sounds like things are going well for you kids tonight,” she says, raising one tattoo-notched eyebrow at the jar of cash that sits in the middle of the table. It’s surrounded by a sea of discarded shot glasses. “This round’s on me.”
The tray of shots looks like a revolver chamber full of oiled bullets. Everyone on the team takes one, their tongues already flinching away from the idea of whatever Ramona might be inflicting on the group. Kinsey raises her glass in a wobbling hand, and looks around the table.
“Domino. Mads. Nkrumah. Jacques. Saskia. You all decided tonight that you want to stay out here, in this fucking gorgeous awful place, for another six months. Every single one of you is a fool for giving up the opportunity to return to polite society.”
