Page 31 of Spread Me
“It won’t all come down here,” Mads says. “The winds at that altitude are fast. They’ll carry the sand faster than we can imagine. Like those frog eggs in Birmingham, remember? It ended up raining tadpoles in Santa Cruz. Anything that gets lifted up that high in the air travels, it has to. The sand’ll come down miles from here. He’ll be fine.”
“Even when the storm passes, though,” Kinsey ventures. She can tell from the look on Nkrumah’s face that she’s saying what they’re both thinking. “Even then.” She feels like she’s reciting lines. The words are fat wooden beads strung along a fixed wire in her mind, destined to fall one after theother no matter how she pushes them. “If we leave here, we take the virus with us. We can’t risk this spreading beyond the station.”
Both of them turn to Mads. It’s not fair—Mads is the station doctor, yes, but that role doesn’t leave them with the responsibility of deciding whether or not the station is under full quarantine. Still, fair or not, Kinsey and Nkrumah both wait on Mads’s decision.
“You’re right. We can’t leave.” They nod to Kinsey. “The virus—or maybe the entire lichen, I don’t know—jumped from the specimen to Jacques within minutes of making physical contact, and the rest of us were sick within hours. That means interspecies transmission. And the specimen was—it was buried, right, when you all found it?”
“When Domino found it,” Nkrumah corrects. Her gaze drops to the floor when she says Domino’s name. Maybe she’s remembering how she and Domino had been bickering over the specimen as they brought it inside. Maybe she’s realizing that the last thing she said to them before they were taken over by the virus waswho digs a hole just to piss?
“Right. So it was buried, which means it was probably dead, or at least in some kind of deep torpor, before Domino dug it up. That indicates the lichen can potentially live in dead tissue.”
“Feed on dead tissue,” Kinsey ventures. “I mean—it’s a fungus. It can do more than just inhabit a dead thing. It can feed.”
“Which means there’s no downside to the death of the host,” Nkrumah finishes. “The only thing that can prevent spread is isolation. So we agree we can’t leave, yes? And we can’t call for help when the phone and Wi-Fi come back online, because anyone who comes here will get infected, too.”
“Unless we destroy it somehow,” Kinsey adds thoughtfully. “What kills viruses? Fire, alcohol…?”
Nkrumah clicks her tongue ring against her teeth thoughtfully. “Antibodies, but we don’t have any of those lying around. Not for this one, anyway.”
“Well, maybe we do, though,” Mads says. “I mean, the three of us all got sick, but didn’t get taken over, right? So we might have antibodies.”
Nkrumah looks sidelong at Mads, then briefly glances at Kinsey before her gaze drops to the linoleum. “We don’t know,” she replies slowly, “that none of us got taken over.”
No one says anything for a long time. The rattle of the ventilation system, the soft patter of sand against the roof, the gentle human sounds of breath and discomfort—all that, but no words, because there’s no answer to the point Nkrumah has made. It’s the kind of point that divides people into those who can’t stand to say the thing, and those who can’t stand to leave it unsaid.
“We should bring Jacques back inside,” Kinsey says at last. “There’s sand hitting the base. Whether it’s driving at us or falling on us doesn’t matter. If we don’t know for sure that Jacques is—”
“I saw what I saw,” Nkrumah says in a low, exhausted voice.
“I believe you,” Kinsey says. “What I’m saying is—if we don’t know how long the lichen can survive in desert conditions? We don’t know how far Jacques can get. He could walk to town. He could walk to Boot Hill.”
“What did you ask him?” Mads asks. “Before we decided to make him leave, you asked something. What was it?”
“Yeah, and what’s this ‘feeling’ you seem to have?” Nkrumah adds.
Kinsey considers for a long time before answering. “It’s nothing,” she says at last.
“I don’t think it is,” Mads says slowly. “You’re the one who first saw that Domino wasn’t human anymore. Saskia, too.”
Nkrumah sits up a little straighter. “Yeah,” she says, eyeing Kinsey. “What tipped you off about them?”
“The extra mouths and eyes and tongues,” Kinsey says. “Same as you.”
“No other clues?” Mads looks disappointed, almost desperate. “There must be something.”
Kinsey shakes her head. “Nothing.”
“That’s bullshit,” Nkrumah says. Kinsey’s still not looking at her, but the force of her gaze is laserlike. “Therewassomething. You said that Domino was acting weird before the thing with all the mouths.”
“Did I? I don’t remember saying that.” Kinsey’s clothes feel too tight all of a sudden. She tugs at the neck of her shirt, trying to loosen it, then sits on her hands when she realizes she’s performing a cartoonishly obvious pantomime ofhiding something.
“You did. You did say it,” Mads says, their posture sharpening in a mirror of Nkrumah’s. The mood between the two of them has shifted from defeat to attention.
“I remember,” Nkrumah says, gaining momentum. “You said something about how they acted when you were showering. Their hair dried too fast, right? And you said—”
“She said that they probably only wanted to look at the specimen in order to get her alone,” Mads finishes. “What made you think that? Was it something in their tone, or their affect, or—”
Kinsey wishes the station had a window she could climb out of. Her heart is a trapped grasshopper slammingagainst the glass jar of her body. She shrugs. “I don’t know, I just… I probably just thought that in hindsight?”
