Page 40 of Spread Me
But the body she can feel—the tight sweet tension at her nipples, the slow heat between her legs, the gooseflesh across the back of her neck—is a million miles away. Because Jacques is dead, and Nkrumah is dead, and Mads is dead, and everyone is dead, and she can’t want them and grieve them at the same time. She’s full of white static, she’s full of molten metal, it’s all too much.
Nkrumah doesn’t look at Kinsey, doesn’t take her attention off Jacques. “Of course this is what you want,” she says, rising to her knees to square her hips up with Jacques’s. She pauses, positions the tip of his cock between her thighs. “You’re soaking. Touch yourself. You’llfeel it. You’ll understand why I want to feel it. The way you make your own moisture is incredible. We could grow so much together.” She eases herself down onto Jacques’s length with mechanical precision. “Did you know that this one was a little in love with you? I’m not doing anything with her body that she didn’t fantasize about showing you anyway.” Beneath her, Jacques rasps out a rough moan and grips her pumping hips with his limp hands. “It’s okay to enjoy it.”
“Feel,” the creature behind Kinsey whispers. It licks the side of her neck with a sandpaper tongue, takes her wrist and pushes her fingers down into the soft damp heat at the center of her. “Don’t you feel?”
The touch electrifies her. She still feels far from her body, still can’t make sense of the hunger that’s been building inside of her—but she can feel that touch on her wrist.
It summons a sudden flash flood of adrenaline that sparks movement into her limbs. She jerks away from the creature, whips around to face it. Surprise freezes it, its eyeless face looking at her without understanding. Kinsey jukes left before lunging to the right, slipping past it. The creature tries to block her. She’s too fast. She dodges around it before it can catch her.
“Kinsey, wait,” Jacques and Nkrumah call in unison. Mads’s fingers snag in her shirt. She hears the fabric tear as she plunges into the darkness of the hallway. She doesn’t stop, doesn’t slow down. She can’t. If she does, she knows she’ll turn back.
She needs to be gone before she can change her mind.
“It’s not too late to change your mind.” The TQI hiring manager, Kathryn Bell, is holding a stack of keycards. Desert dust has already coated her suede ankle boots, and a smear of something white runs up the side of her black trousers like a tuxedo stripe. Her mask is top-of-the-line—fitted cloth with an internal filtration layer, the best possible protection against the new H7N3 strain. “If you don’t want to be a desert hermit for the next four years, now’s your chance to run.”
Kinsey smiles and takes the stack of keycards. She took her own mask off the second she got into the TQI Jeep that was waiting for her at the airstrip outside Boot Hill. She can already feel the relief of this place. Of not having to choose. For the past seven months, necessary safety protocols have grated against her secret yearning to tongue thebumpy capsid of the H7N3 virus. Before that, it was the Rivian Retrovirus. Before that—
She stops herself. She’s free now. Here at Kangas Station, she will know relief. The only dangers here will be environmental. Whatever pandemic rages out in the wide world, it won’t be able to touch her here. It won’t be able to tempt her. She can work, and manage her team, and gaze out across the wide expanse of desert that surrounds her.
She holds out her hand for the stack of keycards. “Appreciate you giving me the chance to run, but it’s not going to happen. I can’t imagine anywhere I’d rather be.”
Kinsey’s running hard and fast. Down the hall, around the corner, her heels falling hard on the sand-strewn linoleum. She stops at the airlock door, panicked, then remembers the pile of keycards in the canteen. Doubling back to get them feels risky, but it’s worth it—she finds all six of them there, stacked on the scarred coffee table, and she takes them all. Then she books it for the airlock, getting there just as the voices in the residential corridor start to get louder.
She holds the entire handful of keycards up to the reader until it blinks green and that’s it. She’s out. She slams the heavy door behind her, sealing herself out of the research station.
It’s pitch-dark in the airlock. No light, no windows. She leans against the closed interior door. The sound of her own breathing is too loud so she goes still, holds her breath eventhough it makes her dizzy. She waits to see if she can hear anyone pursuing her. There are quick footfalls from inside the station, the patter of two people on each other’s heels.
When she can’t hold her breath anymore, Kinsey eases herself away from the door. She stumbles forward, her hands stretched out in front of her, feeling her way toward the squat shelving unit on pure instinct. There’s a junky flashlight on one of those shelves, a hefty one with four corroded batteries in it. That flashlight will give her enough light to find the keys to the Jeep. The Jeep will get her out of here.
A silent sob rips out of her as her hands find purchase on the dusty corner of the shelves. Squatting, shaking with unspent adrenaline, she feels her way from shelf to shelf, pushing her hands into the gaps to feel for what’s on each one. Past the rustling fabric of Saskia’s discarded windbreaker, behind a stack of ancient roadmaps, next to the heavy plastic of a charging walkie-talkie that no one will ever use again—she finally closes her fingers around cool, smooth metal.
The flashlight comes to life in her hands, the white beam cutting away the darkness inside the airlock. She aims it at the wall above the shelves, squints at the glaring white-painted pegboard until her eyes adjust and she can see the keys to the Jeep hanging on their hook. The metal key-edge digs a promise of escape into her palm.
From here it’s just a few meters to the exterior door. To the Jeep. To freedom and civilization and certain safety. She turns to run for the exterior door.
She freezes.
She is not alone in the airlock.
The flashlight beam illuminates a face. It stares down from the wall just above the door. As Kinsey watches,paralyzed, a forked tongue emerges to taste the air. To taste her breath and her sweat and her fear.
The face turns to follow the taste of her.
“Kinsey,” Domino’s voice rasps from somewhere behind the just-parted lips. “Where are you going?”
Kinsey doesn’t have time to run. Behind her, she can hear footsteps pattering past the interior door again. She knows it’s a matter of minutes before that door opens. In front of her, Domino climbs down the wall, their fingers spread wide to grip the stamped vinyl. A small shower of sand rains down every time they move.
“How did you get out?” Kinsey whispers.
“Nkrumah let me out. She let Saskia out, too. I’m sure they’re on their way.”
“Let me go,” Kinsey pleads. “Please. Just let me leave.”
“Where are you going to go?” Domino asks. Another few inches and they’ll be blocking the door entirely. Kinsey tries to get a good look at them, but the flashlight flickers and dims. She smacks it hard with her palm. It responds by flickering again. “You love it here,” Domino presses. “Why would you leave?”
“To warn people. The world has to know what’s coming,” she says. “They have to know that you’re going to kill them all.”
Domino climbs down the wall a little farther, skirting the edges of the flashlight beam. Kinsey can make out only a few details of their body—a ripple of bronze flesh, a long multi-jointed leg splaying out into the shadows. Their contours seem ill-defined, changeable. Shifting. “You don’t have to do that,” they say. “They’ll find out on their own. Everyone dies someday, Kinsey, and hardly anybody gets a warning about it before it happens.”
