Page 37 of Spread Me
Kinsey is wearing only her shirt and underwear, a state of undress that she’s starting to associate with Mads. Mads, as far as she can tell, is in their underwear and nothing else. She doesn’t remember falling asleep here, but she does have a vague recollection of pulling her bra off through oneshirtsleeve, announcing herself the champion of locker-room modesty.
It’s pleasant, being half-undressed next to Mads. Maybe there will be embarrassment later. That doesn’t matter. “Later” is a distant shoreline.
She swims her bare legs through the blankets, searching for theirs, wanting to feel the closeness of them along the entire length of her body. She only finds a thin layer of grit between the sheets. They shift in their sleep, tighten their grip around her. She hears a soft murmur from just behind one of her ears, goes still to try to keep from waking them. Once they seem settled, she sends her legs searching again.
This time, she does find something. Her foot meets something solid, something that’s tangled up in the blankets. She nudges her way past fabric, searching Mads out, her mind already sinking back into sleep. Her ankle slides between two strong, heavy legs, her foot sliding along the arch of Mads’s foot, her knee notching in over theirs.
Mads shifts behind her, nuzzles their face into the back of her hair. They make a strange, wet snuffling sound. It’s enough to fully banish the promise of sleep, and with no small amount of regret, she accepts that she’s awake. Whatever that sound was, it’s more important than the deep black bliss of unconsciousness.
“You okay?” she whispers.
They don’t reply.
“Hey,” she says softly, lacing her fingers through theirs and squeezing their hand where it rests over her belly. Memories of the day before are coming into full focus in her mind. Mads had stopped crying when they’d started drinking. Maybe sobriety is bringing the tears back to them. “It’s okay. We’ll figure something out. Nkrumah’sprobably not even awake yet, we’d have heard her thumping around. We’ve got time. Yeah?”
They still don’t say anything. Their arms are tight around her, and they sniff into the back of her hair again. They sound deeply congested. She wonders briefly how long they were crying before she woke up, how she didn’t notice sooner.
“Mads? Here, let me—” She pulls away. Mads clings to her, tries to prevent her from turning over in the bed, but she extracts herself from their arms. “I don’t even remember falling asleep,” she says as she stretches to reach for the bedside lamp. “When did we turn the lights off?”
There’s no answer. Kinsey turns the lamp on, blinks briefly in the light. Then she turns over to look Mads in the eyes.
But there are no eyes to meet.
It takes Kinsey a second to understand what she’s seeing: curled up between her and the wall, half-tangled in the blankets, is the specimen from the desert. Its head rests on Mads’s pillow, a soft spill of sand from one of the eye sockets scattered across the sheets. Its neck vanishes into a dune of bedding.
But Kinsey knows what she felt—fingers, toes, the silk of bare skin against hers. None of that belonged to the specimen. None of that was wrapped around her.
She whips the bedsheets back and sees the rest.
It’s Mads. Mads’s arms, Mads’s legs, Mads’s belly. It’s their body—unmistakable, underwear-clad, soft with sleep. But it stops at the shoulders, becoming something else. The scattered hair that normally peppers Mads’s chest is thick now, thick and thicker as it goes up toward a furred neck. The rest of them is gone, replaced by the head of the thing they found in the desert. No soft jaw, no warm eyes, no thick curls.
That, Kinsey understands, is the snuffling she heard: it was the blunt wet coyote-nose of the specimen, breathing into her hair.
Mads is gone. It has devoured them. It has destroyed them. It has replaced them.
Kinsey stumbles backward. The creature in the bed lunges after her. It rises to Mads’s knees, reaches toward her with Mads’s hand, clutches at her shoulder with Mads’s fingers. It draws a rattling breath, sucking air down what sounds like half a windpipe. The breath catches on a chain of dry coughs—the creature doubles over and sand drops out of its open mouth like a broken hourglass,pat-pattingonto the bedsheets with every lung-cracking heave.
Kinsey doesn’t wait to see if the creature will catch its breath. She slips off the edge of the bed. She lands on the pile of discarded clothes and scrambles crabwise for the door.
The creature dives after her. It stretches one of Mads’s long muscular arms toward her. Kinsey jerks her legs back but she isn’t fast enough—fingers wrap around her ankle, stronger than Mads’s grip ever could have been. It jerks her back toward the bed. Her ass slides along the floor, the carpet shearing a layer of skin off the backs of her bare thighs. For a gut-clenching instant she feels the joint creak loose of the socket as the creature hauls her by the ankle.
Pain and fear yank a scream out of her—and to her shock, at the sound of her screaming, the creature lets go.
“Wait,” the specimen says. It speaks with a rasping, cracked version of Mads’s voice. “Don’t run, Kinsey, please just let me explain!”
“Explain what?!” Kinsey yells. “Don’t come near me! What did you do to Mads?”
“Mads is gone,” the specimen explains. It blinks ather—one eye socket still full of packed sand, the other half-hollow, revealing a flash of white bone. “But look, it’s okay! I talked with Domino and Saskia—”
“What?” For a moment—just an instant—she hopes wildly that maybe the real Domino and Saskia are still alive somewhere, cocooned in silk or buried in tunnels or sealed into the walls, somewhere she can track them down, somewhere she can save them—
“Isn’t that what you called those versions of me? Domino, the me with the…” It gestures to its armpit. “And Saskia, the one I did a little better with. Isn’t that what you named those versions?”
Kinsey shakes her head, covers her mouth with both hands. “No,” she moans. “No, no, no, what do you mean you talked to them, what—”
“They told me how things went when they tried to, you know. Connect with you,” the specimen says. The euphemism is somehow a thousand times worse than if it had just saidwhen they tried to fuck you. “And we figured out what you really want. It’s this, right?” It pulls itself to its knees and turns on all fours to face her. It cocks one ear on the coyote-head, sits back on its knees like a dog settling onto its haunches. “It’s everything you want. A beautiful body, just like the one on Mads. And the mystery and interest of a novel specimen, just like the body you dug up in the desert. None of the responsibility and sentiment of a human mind,” it adds proudly, running a hand over its own sleek head. “But all the landscape of a human body.” Its hand drops, skims over Mads’s barrel chest and full belly. It dips the hand under the waistband of its boxer briefs.
“Stop,” Kinsey breathes. She looks away—but then, unable to help herself, she glances back. Under the thin fabric, Mads’s hand is working rhythmically at their crotch. “Stop!”
