Page 18 of Spread Me

The three of them sit on the floor. Nkrumah’s back is to the residential hall; Mads’s back is to the canteen hall. Kinsey’s back is to the lab hall.

None of them wants to have their back to the door they just closed on Jacques.

“Let’s try to stay realistic,”

Mads says.

“I know this is scary, but there’s no reason to think we’re all going to die.”

Nkrumah slouches, flicking the keycard rhythmically with her thumb.

“It’s weird to me that you said ‘let’s stay realistic’ and then followed that immediately with something that has absolutely zero grounding in reality. We have every reason to think we’re all going to die, Mads. I don’t know if you noticed, but three of our colleagues are gone, the weather is fucked, and all of us are losing the ability to cope.”

Kinsey swallows.

“We might be able to get our people back, though. We might be able to cure them.”

Nkrumah closes her eyes.

“Why do I have to be the voice of reason? They’ve been replaced. Replaced means dead. That thing Domino found in the desert,”

she adds, her eyes snapping open again to fix on Kinsey.

“killed them. Do you understand? They’re dead. And we’re next. Unless we leave, which…”

Kinsey meets Nkrumah’s unforgiving gaze.

“Which we can’t. It’s still storming out there, even if the wind has been quiet for the last hour or so. It’s high in the atmosphere right now, but it’ll drop.”

“That’s why the sky is still red,”

Mads says with slow-dawning comprehension.

“Domino told me about this once. The storm is moving fast enough to lift sand up into the stratosphere.”

“But it can’t stay there for long,”

Nkrumah says.

“It’s incredible that it’s stayed that high for so long already.”

As if on cue, there’s a soft patter on the ceiling. It dies away fast, like a brief scattering of early rain before a storm, but the three of them freeze. Kinsey doesn’t doubt that they’re all thinking of Jacques.

“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 the other 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 was who 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.

“There was something. 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 of hiding 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 slamming against the glass jar of her body. She shrugs.

“I don’t know, I just … I probably just thought that in hindsight?”

“Think,”

Nkrumah urges.

“Think back. It could help. Come on, you were in the shower, and…?”

“And, I don’t know, they were kind of”—she doesn’t want to say it, she has no choice but to say it—“flirting with me?”

Mads shakes their head.

“We knew that. They came on to you in the exam room, right? And—”

“What about Saskia?”

Nkrumah interrupts.

“When I was moving the bookshelves with Jacques, she was calling your name through the lab door. Did she come on to you too?”

Kinsey shrugs. “Maybe?”

The lie feels like cooling candle wax on her tongue.

“I don’t know, I can never tell when someone’s flirting with me. Are you sure it was my name she was saying?”

“I heard it too,”

Mads says.

“And she was staring at you a lot when we were talking about splitting up to check each other over. She was doing that thing,”

they add, lifting a hand to their throat.

“Oh, yeah, the horny necklace thing she does,”

Nkrumah says, snapping and pointing at Mads.

“That’s her tell. She always fidgets with that cross when she’s turned on.”

Kinsey holds her hands up, trying to stop them.

“Guys, stop. None of that makes any sense,”

she says.

“Why would the lichen—why would it have the same tells as Saskia? That doesn’t—”

“It replicated Domino well enough to whistle,”

Nkrumah says. She’s picking up speed, gaining enthusiasm.

“Yesterday I could hear them whistling in the shower from clear down the hall. Obviously the lichen is picking up our behaviors too. Neural pathway mirroring, maybe? Kinsey, think hard, okay, this is important.”

She studies Kinsey’s face with rapt intensity.

“Did Saskia flirt with you?”

Kinsey closes her eyes. Remembers the chill of Saskia’s necklace pressing into the nape of her neck. She feels briefly dizzy with need.

“I think so,”

she says weakly.

“Yeah, I think she might have.”

“That’s it, then,”

Nkrumah says, pushing herself to her feet.

“The lichen wants Kinsey. Mads, are you horny for Kinsey?”

“Uh,”

Mads says, “I don’t—”

“Because I’m not horny for Kinsey,”

Nkrumah continues, seemingly oblivious to Mads’s discomfort.

“So you and I are fine, then. Kinsey, sorry, I’m not gonna ask if you’re horny for yourself, you’d just lie anyway if you were.”

“I wouldn’t—wait,”

Kinsey says.

But it’s too late. Nkrumah has momentum, and she’s not stopping for anyone.

“This is an easy solve,”

she says, turning her entire body to face Mads.

“We just have to kill Kinsey.”

Kinsey is on her feet before she knows she’s about to stand.

“What? No, that’s—”

“We’ve been thinking about this all wrong. It wants Kinsey. It’s only pursuing Kinsey. Think about it, Mads,”

Nkrumah says eagerly.

“Domino didn’t try anything with you when you went into that room, right? They didn’t try to hurt you, they didn’t even try to touch you.”

“Definitely didn’t flirt with me,”

Mads says, frowning thoughtfully.

“That’s true. It doesn’t seem compulsive. Honestly, it doesn’t even seem malicious. Maybe we’re jumping to conclusions here. We’ve been reacting with fear but we have no proof that this lichen wants to hurt us.”

That’s too much for Kinsey.

“It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t want to hurt us,”

she says. The sand on the roof is louder now, tapping like Nkrumah’s finger on the exam room glass. Kinsey doesn’t want to say any of this. Speaking it out loud is almost unbearably painful—it’s the thing she never lets herself think, never lets herself look at straight on.

“They’re viruses. A virus doesn’t want to hurt anyone, it just wants to live. It just wants to survive and propagate. It can’t help the fact that its very existence hurts everything it touches. It can’t help it,”

she says again, her voice breaking on a sob.

“But that’s what we can’t afford to forget—whether it wants to kill us or not, killing is all it’s capable of. We can’t forget that. People will die if we do.”

Mads regards her. Then their gaze shifts behind her, to stare down the corridor where Domino’s and Saskia’s doubles lie in wait.

“You’re both right,” they say.

Kinsey doesn’t like the resignation in their voice.

“How do you mean?”

They’re quiet for a long time. They won’t look away from the lab corridor. Their shoulders rise, then slump forward. When they finally answer her, they sound hollowed out.

“Kinsey, you’re right that it doesn’t matter what the lichen wants—it’s dangerous. And Nkrumah, you’re right that we should kill Kinsey.”

Kinsey takes a half step backward, away from them both. “What?!”

“Not just you,”

Mads says, as though that’s better.

“It’s not just you that needs to die. It’s all three of us. And Saskia, and Domino. And Jacques, too,”

they add, glancing toward the door to the airlock.

“We should bring him inside and kill him. And then we should burn this place to the ground.”

“Mads—”

Mads rubs their eyes, digging their knuckles into the deep hollows of fatigue there.

“It’s the only way to make sure we eliminate the lichen completely. So none of us can risk transmitting it to the rest of the world.”

Kinsey looks back and forth between them.

“You can’t be serious. We’re not killing ourselves. That’s—it’s just not what we’re doing,”

she says, feeling ridiculous as the first real flutter of panic unfurls inside of her.

“No. There has to be a better solution. There’s always a better solution.”

“Not this time,”

Nkrumah says. Her eyes are still bright, her expression still engaged and enthusiastic—but her face isn’t moving. It’s a mask, Kinsey realizes, and it’s stuck.

“I can go get the field rifle from the Jeep. Let’s not waste time. Mads, are any of the cleaning supplies in the storage closet good for accelerant?”

“Wait.”

Kinsey’s entire body is buzzing.

“Wait wait wait. Stop. Please—there’s something I haven’t told you.”

Mads and Nkrumah both turn to face her. They look energized, terrified, determined. They look ready to face death—but when Kinsey speaks, they still listen. They wait for her to tell them the thing that will change their minds and save them all.

She has to save them all.

“I—”

Kinsey freezes, realizes that everything she hasn’t said, every secret she’s holding, has the potential to make things worse. It doesn’t matter. She has to say something. She has to stop them.

“I never got sick,”

she says at last.

“What do you mean? Of course you did,”

Mads says, frowning.

“We all did.”

“I didn’t. I lied. I just didn’t want to catch what everyone else had. I stayed in my room for a few days while the rest of you got sick, but I was fine the whole time.”

“But you were one of the first ones who got sick,”

Nkrumah says, tilting her head to one side.

“You couldn’t have known that everyone would—”

“Mads called quarantine,”

Kinsey interrupts.

“I figured, better safe than sorry. I shouldn’t have lied,”

she adds, hoping that admitting this small failure will save her from having to own up to any bigger ones.

“It was selfish of me. I just didn’t know how to tell you before now. I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter,”

Mads says.

“Of course it does.”

Kinsey needs it to.

“I don’t—I don’t want to die. And since I didn’t get sick, we know the virus didn’t get me. Maybe I’m immune or something,”

she says, trying desperately to iron the tremble out of her voice.

“I can go get help. I can go tell someone what’s happening. I can—”

“It doesn’t matter,”

Mads says again, more firmly this time.

“Just because you didn’t have symptoms, that doesn’t mean you didn’t get the virus. You could be a carrier. Hell, for all we know, you could be an incubator.”

“I’m not—”

“It’s not a chance we can afford to take,”

Mads says.

“If this lichen gets out of the desert, that’s an extinction-level event. This thing kills whatever it touches and eats whatever it kills. It would wipe out humanity.”

“It would wipe out everything,”

Nkrumah breathes. Her adrenaline seems to be ebbing at last. Her shoulders slump, her chin sinking to her chest.

“Everything. Gone. We have to. We have to—shit. God damn it. Fuck.”

Kinsey reaches a tentative hand toward Nkrumah, rests it on her shoulder.

“This is too big for us to figure out right now,”

Kinsey says. She tries to make it gentle, soft. She tries not to sound terrified.

“We’re all exhausted and scared and overwhelmed. Let’s sleep on it, okay?”

“What’s the point?”

Nkrumah asks.

“Sleeping won’t make the situation any better.”

“No,”

Kinsey agrees.

“but it might make us smarter. There are answers. We just have to come up with them.”

Mads nods. “Okay.”

“Really?”

Kinsey’s head swims with relief.

“Yeah, fine,”

Nkrumah agrees.

“Eight hours. We meet back here—”

“In the canteen,”

Kinsey interrupts.

“I want to sit on a couch.”

“Fine,”

Nkrumah says. She sounds more exhausted by the second.

“We all need to eat something. I gotta put this fucking thing back on the pile,”

she adds, brandishing the keycard she used to exile Jacques.

“But if nobody has a better idea eight hours from now, we end this. Deal?”

Kinsey gives her shoulder a soft squeeze. “Deal.”

They walk down the hall to their respective bedrooms in silence. Kinsey locks her door, then leans against it, staring at the painting on her wall and hoping an answer will come to her before dawn.