Page 16 of Spread Me

It’s too cold outside at night for a picnic to make any sense, but everyone comes out with Mads anyway. They spread out four of Saskia’s knitted blankets on the sand a quarter mile from the station.

Domino brings the big pot from the canteen; when they take off the lid, a cloud of steam rises into the air. It’s a dish Domino calls Big Noodle, a combination of seven different flavors of instant ramen with a whole bag of frozen vegetables thrown in during the boil. It smells like shrimp and chicken and beef all at once. The tiny cubes of soft carrot stand out against the salt slap of the noodles. Everyone eats out of the pot at once, their forks diving past each other like swooping vultures. No one speaks.

Then Kinsey opens a bottle of wine and hands it to Mads. They look down at it in silence for a minute or two, their hand engulfing the narrow glass neck. Then they raise it high into the air.

“Five years ago,”

they begin. Their voice is quiet, but the entire desert is so still tonight that it seems like the ear of the world is pressed to Mads’s sternum.

“Five years ago tonight, I lost track of time. I was at my practice, catching up on paperwork and fucking around on my phone and just kind of … I don’t know. Probably watching videos or some shit. And when I finally got home, the only person there was this young cop. He was waiting for me on the porch. He looked, I don’t know, maybe eighteen?”

They look out across the dark desert.

“He looked scared to tell me what he had to tell me. I remember thinking, I can’t believe they sent you to do this alone.”

Saskia reaches out and rests a hand on Mads’s shoulder. They reach up and press their palm over her knuckles, hard enough that Kinsey can’t tell if they’re holding her in place or pushing her away.

“And then he told me what he had to tell me. He gave me the alone-ness. He’d been there alone, and then he handed it off to me, and suddenly, I was the one who was alone. And he went back to wherever baby cops go, and I stayed on my front porch and watched the stars come out, because I couldn’t make myself go inside and see how alone I was,”

Mads says.

They raise the wine bottle high overhead, then take a long drink from it. They cough a few times.

“I don’t feel that way here. I don’t get a moment’s fucking peace from any of you,”

they add, laughing. And then they raise the bottle high again.

“Thank you all for not making me be alone out here tonight.”

They drink again, then pass the bottle. Mads will stay out here in the cold until the sun comes up, and everyone will stay with them.

Mads drapes a blanket around Kinsey’s shoulders. She’s on the couch in the little nook outside the exam room. She can’t stop shivering. The rest of the team heard her screams and came to her rescue—Ma

Even though she ran—even though she called for help and got it, even though she’s shaking with fear—she can’t help the yearning that’s blooming just beneath the surface of her skin. Everything she’s ever wanted is behind two thin walls on either side of her. Domino in the exam room, Saskia in the lab. Everything in her is taut with desire.

She bites the inside of her cheek hard, grips the knitted blanket in one fist. Forces herself to think of the cost of getting what she wants. Two of her colleagues are dead. Two of her friends. Nothing, she tells herself, could fuck her well enough to make that acceptable.

“So,”

Mads says, tucking the blanket around Kinsey a little tighter.

“So,”

she replies.

“Saskia’s the same as Domino. She had a tongue on her hand.”

“A what?”

“A tongue,”

she repeats.

“Instead of fingers.”

Mads goes quiet. When Kinsey looks over, she catches them frowning down at their own fingers, flexing the knuckles. She’s about to offer to check their thumb for tastebuds when the wind outside suddenly dies.

The quiet that falls is as jarring as the howling that’s been surrounding the base for the past several hours. Mads and Kinsey and Jacques all look up at the ceiling, the same way they do when the wind begins. They’re all waiting for the other shoe to drop—for the wind to pick back up, twice as loud, or for a thunderclap to announce that a lightning storm is splitting the dust storm open like a wedge splitting a seam into a mountainside.

“Fuck,”

Nkrumah whispers.

“If she’s infected, that means we can’t go into the lab.”

“Not like we’ve got samples to study anyway,”

Mads says.

Nkrumah’s eyes flash. She rarely loses her temper with Mads, but she looks to be on the verge of it now.

“No. But Weatherman’s in there.”

“We can’t read it without Domino,”

Kinsey offers.

“We could learn,”

Nkrumah snaps.

“We could reread the fucking manual. Without it, we have no way of knowing what’s coming for us.”

Jacques shrugs.

“Okay. So we go in and get Saskia and we toss her in the exam room with Domino. Problem solved.”

Mads shakes their head.

“Hang on. No way. We can’t let her—it, we can’t let it out of there. It’s too dangerous.”

“We can handle it.”

Jacques moves toward the bookshelf barricade.

“I’m with Nkrumah. I want access to Weatherman.”

“Since when do you agree with me that fast?”

Nkrumah’s eyes narrow.

“Actually … since when do you agree with me ever?”

Jacques is already trying to budge one of the heavy bookshelves.

“I agree with you all the time. And you’re right. We need to be able to see what’s coming for us. So let’s—”

Nkrumah cuts him off.

“Hang on a second. Jacques, hold out your arms.”

“What?”

Jacques looks down at himself, then turns and looks over his shoulder, his eyes wide.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Where is it?”

Nkrumah asks. “Show us.”

Kinsey is on her feet, the blanket falling away.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know,”

Jacques says, looking down at himself.

“I don’t know, I don’t see anything—”

“Bullshit.”

Nkrumah slowly shakes her head. Her fingers curl and flex at her sides.

“You’re one of them. You think you’re slick, but I see you.”

Jacques holds his hands up, palms out.

“I didn’t do anything. I was just helping move the shelf so we can get Saskia and—”

Nkrumah lifts one hand to point a rigid finger at him.

“I see you. I see you, whatever the fuck you are,”

she says, the pitch of her voice starting to rise. Her every word echoes in the corridor now that there are no bookshelves to soften the sound and no wind to smother it.

Mads steps toward her.

“You’re tired. We’re all tired. Let’s not panic and start accusing each other of—”

“I’m not panicked,”

Nkrumah says. Her index finger aims at Mads and they freeze in place.

“Don’t come near me. Don’t take another step.”

Kinsey rises and moves between them, holds a hand out in either direction.

“Both of you stop. Nkrumah, go stand with Mads.”

“Don’t tell me—”

“Now,”

Kinsey snaps. Without waiting to see if Nkrumah is still refusing to go, she turns to Jacques. He has two arms as far as she can tell. Ten fingers, one crooked from a bad break. “Smile,”

Kinsey orders, and he does, revealing slightly crooked teeth, one chipped canine, a bouquet of crinkles around each eye. “Turn,”

she says, and he turns, his arms out by his sides, his feet moving in a slow shuffle.

“He looks normal,”

Mads says.

“So did Saskia,”

Nkrumah replies. Kinsey glances over her shoulder to find that Mads has moved closer to Nkrumah, so they’re standing together even though Nkrumah hasn’t budged.

“He’s not acting normal. I’m telling you, he’s one of those things. We have to—”

She stops abruptly midsentence.

Jacques’s eyes widen in alarm.

“Have to what? Kill me?”

“Of course not,”

Mads says.

“Probably,”

Nkrumah says at the same time.

“Wait,”

Jacques says.

“You wouldn’t do that. You didn’t even kill Domino, and we know for sure that they’re infected.”

Nkrumah covers her mouth with one hand, seems to chew on a thought for a few seconds. When she drops her hand, her jaw is taut, her eyes glassy.

“Not infected,”

she says.

“Dead. You’re the one who said I have to accept that it isn’t Domino in there anymore, remember? It’s something else, it’s a—a lichen. It’s not our friend. All it wants to do is consume us.”

Her voice wobbles on the last few words and she stops speaking altogether.

“Well, I don’t wanna consume anyone, so maybe we can all just calm down. Okay? Okay. Okay?”

Jacques is starting to sound genuinely scared. Kinsey doesn’t blame him. She’s never seen Nkrumah cry. She doesn’t want to know what thought is so unbearable that it’s brought her colleague to the edge of tears.

She bites her tongue. She can think of something the lichen seems to want, something that Nkrumah doesn’t know about. She can’t tell her team—can’t imagine how she’d even start. But it gives her an idea.

She turns to regard Jacques. Locks her eyes onto his. Wets her lips. “Jacques,”

she says softly, almost under her breath, hoping that only he can hear.

“What do you want?”

He looks at her with stark incomprehension. “What?”

“What do you want?”

she asks again. Takes a step toward him. She tries to look at him the way she looked at Domino, the way she looked at Saskia.

“You can tell me.”

“I—I don’t know,”

he says, shaking his head, his eyes filling with bewildered tears.

“I don’t know. What do you mean?”

“I mean,”

she says in a whisper so soft she can barely hear herself.

“do you want me?”

She’s asking him but she’s also asking herself: Do I want him? Kinsey has never looked at Jacques with desire, nothing even close to it, but she looks at him now and tries to call it up: the way she’d been unable to take her eyes off Domino, the way she’d been unable to resist Saskia’s touch. Looking at Jacques, Kinsey tries to see the virus in him, the same way she saw it in them.

Jacques gives his head a fractional shake, more like an involuntary twitch than an expression of preference.

“I don’t want anything right now. Except maybe a drink,”

he adds with a half laugh.

Kinsey stares at him for a few more seconds.

“He’s not infected,”

she calls over her shoulder, not taking her eyes off Jacques.

“How do you know?”

Mads sounds genuinely curious.

“I … can tell,”

Kinsey replies.

“Domino and Saskia both made me feel a certain way. Jacques doesn’t.”

Mads looks at her exactly the way she deserves to be looked at for saying something like that.

Nkrumah shakes her head, unconvinced.

“I don’t buy it. We can’t take one person’s word for this. If you’re infected, you could be covering for him.”

“Oh, but we can take one person’s word that I am infected?”

Jacques says icily, leaning around Kinsey to glare at Nkrumah.

“It doesn’t matter either way,”

Mads insists.

“We’re not killing Jacques. Not if we’re not completely sure.”

Nkrumah folds her arms across her chest, tilts her head. On her, this posture is a rattling tail, Kinsey knows. It’s a red-dawn sky, a cocked pistol. It’s a warning. “Well,”

she says, “fine.”

“Fine?”

Jacques whispers.

Nkrumah nods.

“We won’t kill him.”

* * *

Ten minutes later, Jacques stands in the airlock, a half-empty bottle of white rum in one hand, a liter of water in the other. Nkrumah holds a keycard in her hand, and she’s waiting next to the interior airlock door, ready to scan it.

“You can’t do this,”

Jacques says for the twentieth time. He shuffles his feet in the several inches of sand that coat the airlock floor. Sweat is already beading on his brow.

“Please. I’ll die out there. You know I will. Kinsey, you’re the team lead. You can stop this. You can make a different decision.”

Kinsey feels like the underside of her skin is erupting in hidden hives. Because he’s right. She could stop this. But stopping this would mean admitting the reason why she thinks he’s not infected. It would mean letting her team—what’s left of them—know the most urgent desire of her secret heart. It would mean letting them know how deeply she wants the virus to stay.

So she loads her voice with authority, even as she doesn’t meet Jacques’s eye.

“This is my decision. It’s just for a few hours,”

she says.

“Just until we figure out what’s going on. The storm died down already. You’ll be perfectly safe.”

That, at least, doesn’t feel like a lie. The wind isn’t tearing at the walls of the base anymore. The sky is probably clear by now. It’ll be as blue as a butterfly wing out there, Kinsey figures. Hopes.

Jacques takes a halting step toward the inner door.

“You’re not going to figure out what’s going on. You’re going to kill each other. Please, just—at least lock me in one of the rooms inside, like you did with Domino and Saskia.”

Nkrumah shakes her head.

“The only other door to shut you behind is a bedroom door. That’s too close to where we’ll be sleeping. It’s not safe.”

Jacques looks ready to cry. His eyes jump from face to face, desperately seeking an ally.

“Shut me in the airlock, then. You can lock the inner door and I’ll stay here. Please,”

he says again.

“It’s hot in here, but you know it’s hotter out there. And another sandstorm could pick up. Or even just a rainstorm. Anything might happen. I won’t make it.”

Mads crosses their arms.

“What if we have to leave, though? The airlock is the only exit route. We’d be trapped.”

Kinsey makes herself look right at Jacques. When he meets her eyes, she feels something, but she can’t be sure if it’s attraction or exhaustion. She hasn’t eaten since—she tries to remember, can’t. Her head swims.

“I’m sorry,”

she says.

“I really am. But my decision is final. You have to go.”

He looks into each of their eyes one last time before giving a slow nod. “Okay,”

he finally says.

“Just for a few hours. Right? Come get me. I’ll wait in the shade on the southeast side of the station.”

His voice breaks.

“I don’t suppose I can have my keycard, can I?”

Mads looks at their feet, shakes their head. Nkrumah looks at the ceiling, scrubs her cheek with the heel of one hand while scanning his keycard with the other. Kinsey forces herself to keep her eyes on Jacques. She watches as he bows his head, watches as he turns away, watches every step he takes toward the exterior door. Nkrumah follows him, a few paces behind, ready to lock him out.

When the door opens, the light outside is deep red. It’s quiet out there. A soft wind blows eddies of sand across the threshold. Not even a sliver of blue sky is visible.

“What is this?”

Jacques says softly, stepping out into the red desert.

“No. Wait, don’t send me out there. The storm isn’t—”

Nkrumah shuts the door behind him before he can finish saying what the storm isn’t. Kinsey doesn’t blink until the keypad beeps twice, promising that the lock has slid home.

The entire time Jacques was on his way out, she was waiting for a tell—waiting for the creature he is to reveal itself to her. A wink, a glance, a slipped detail. Her attention pools in her own legs, her belly, the back of her neck; she searches for her own arousal like it’s a pin dropped on thick carpet.

She doesn’t find anything but a closed door.

When the three of them are back inside, Mads locks the exterior door behind them. Nkrumah lets out a shaky sigh. Kinsey turns to the two of them and crosses her arms.

“Okay. Time to figure out what we’re going to do.”

“Oh, that’s easy,”

Nkrumah laughs.

“It is?”

“I think it’s obvious what we’re going to do, Boss,”

Nkrumah says, her voice flat with certainty.

“We’re going to die.”