Page 4 of Spread Me
Either way, she wants that experience for herself. She wants to be the wire. Never corroding, never rusting, never plucked at by human fingers. A layer of glass between her and the world. Sealed away. That’s what she loves about this tiny wedge of a building she lives in: the miles of isolation on all sides of it. This place affords her a way to keep everything, everyone, at a hundred arms’ lengths.
Everyone except for her team, who drift around inside the research station like glitter in a snow globe, smacking into each other’s bodies and feelings with seemingly no direction or thought at all.
Beyond the wire, beyond the glass, inside the exam room, the specimen isn’t moving. Kinsey can’t tell if it’s still breathing. She wonders why she can’t seem to stop licking her lips.
“Let’s find out what the boss thinks.” That’s Domino, right on time, breaking their sullen silence to appeal to Kinsey’s authority.
Kinsey turns to the team like a clockwork figurine that’s just been wound up. “Nkrumah, quit yelling at everyone. Jacques, drink some water. Mads, either get shorter or sit down. Domino… can you go check Weatherman?”
“On it.” Domino is already on their feet, headed down the hall toward the lab.
She lets her head fall back to rest against the glass, so she’s staring down her nose at her team. They’re sitting inthe vestibule outside the exam room. It used to be dead space between spokes in the quarter-wheel of the station. The team knocked it out six months into their assignment, in a fit of ill-supervised restlessness. There’s a small round table in there that wobbles constantly, two mismatched folding chairs, a faded love seat with duct-tape patches on the cushions. The team is crammed into that nook—some sitting, some standing, all irritated.
Kinsey’s heart swells at the sight of them like a streambed in a flash flood. Their cheeks are flushed. Their eyes are bright. They’re electrified, all of them, with the spark of discovery.
The specimen did this to them, Kinsey thinks. The specimen did thisforthem. Everything she’s ever done—every blister that’s ever bubbled up on her sun-cooked shoulders, every scorpion she’s ever shaken out of her boot, every rule she’s ever broken—it’s all been worth it. For this. For them.
“Why is the specimen in here?” Saskia asks. She’s chewing on her lip, jogging one knee fast enough to make the table vibrate. The zippers on the pockets of her cargo pants rattle. “We aren’t even properly set up to examine it safely. All our PPE is inside the exam room with that fucking thing. We’re functionally helpless. Why’d we bring it full-in? Why expose ourselves to all that risk?”
Kinsey can’t even answer that question to herself, much less to Saskia. “What matters now is what we do with it,” she says instead.
“We’re not doing anything with it,” Nkrumah insists.
“Oh no,” Jacques groans, shortly before leaning over the trash can again.
Kinsey presses one hand to her forehead. “Everyone shut up,” she says. “I need to think.”
Nkrumah scoffs. “All due respect, your last thought gave us some kind of… fucking…Thingto deal with.”
Every eye in the room turns to her. Kinsey points wordlessly at a jar on the little round table. There’s a sticky note taped to the front of the jar with a ballpoint frowny face drawn on it. A slot has been cut in the plastic lid. About five hundred dollars in small bills sit inside.
Nkrumah holds her hands out defensively. “I didn’t.”
“You did,” Mads says. “We all heard you.”
“It’s a completely neutral pronoun!”
Saskia shakes her head. “There was a capital letter on it. You know the rules. You reference the movie, you feed the jar.”
Nkrumah heaves a theatrical sigh, then stands and crosses to the folding table. She pulls a crumpled, sweat-softened five-dollar bill from her bra and drops it in.
All the money inside will eventually go to Sweet Ramona, the proprietor of the only bar in Boot Hill, the closest thing to a town within a hundred miles. Every six months, the team piles into the Jeep and makes a pilgrimage to Sweet Ramona’s Taphouse to get shithoused toasting their isolation. One by one, Kinsey asks each of them if they want to clock out. For each person who says no, she buys the team a round. After the fifth round, they all ask her ifshewants to clock out. When she says no, they hand the jar to Ramona herself; she’ll pour them a generous round of something off the dust-furred top shelf, they’ll leave her whatever’s left in the jar as an outrageously huge tip, and everyone will be hungover for three full days after.
Nkrumah doesn’t contribute to the jar often, but it’s impossible not to make John Carpenter references when you work at a research station in the middle of fuckingnowhere. Fair’s fair. Mads takes Nkrumah’s seat while she’s up.
At the far end of the hall, the lab door opens. Domino emerges, backlit by the red glow of Weatherman’s display. They hold up two fists, their thumbs pointed down. “It’s gonna be bad.”
“How bad?” Jacques groans.
“Three days, minimum. This place is gonna be a dune by sunrise.”
The entire team responds in unison, “Fuck you, Weatherman.”
“It’s just doing its job,” Domino says loyally, even though they’d also cursed the satellite computer that keeps them all aware of incoming storm systems. “What’d I miss?”
“Well, first things first,” Mads says. “What is that… animal?”
“A coyote,” Jacques replies hoarsely.
