Page 2 of Spread Me

She bumps into Mads, her shoulder against their elbow, her heel landing on their toes.

They don’t complain. They never complain.

The door to the exam room is wedged open, a thick paperback crushed between door and doorframe.

It’s Tropic of Cancer —Mads swears it’s unreadable, useful only as a doorstop, but every time Kinsey looks at it she notices more dog-ears among the pages.

It flops to the floor as Mads uses a foot to push the door open wide enough to admit the team.

Saskia stops in the doorway, halting the team’s progress just a few steps from the exam table.

Desert sand rains down from the tarp as it pulls taut.

Saskia is staring down at the specimen, her pale eyes enormous, her jaw slack.

Kinsey wants to scream at her to move—they’re so close to getting to put this thing down.

“What?” Kinsey snaps.

“It moved,” Saskia whispers. The Eastern Orthodox cross around her neck has slipped loose of her mostly unbuttoned shirt. It’s stuck fast to the sweat-tacky expanse of her décolletage, the angled crossbar drawing a cockeyed line between the swell of each of her breasts. “I swear to god it just—”

She doesn’t get to finish her thought, because Jacques’s grip on the tarp falters.

The plastic slides out of his fists. The specimen rolls toward him.

He lunges, hangover-clumsy, for the edge of the tarp—but he catches a fistful of the specimen instead.

His hand finds one of the legs that emerge from the center of the specimen’s abdomen, his fingers sinking into the surprisingly lush fur that covers the limb .

He lets go with a yell, and the specimen comes awake.

The barrel of its chest heaves as it chokes on sand and thick saliva. Its jaw slackens, three long tongues unbraiding, a stream of gritty mucus falling from the corners of its mouth. It lets out a sound like it’s breathing through gravel.

Kinsey lets out a wordless cry. She tries to drag the team and the tarp backward with her, hauling them deeper into the exam room, aiming the many-legged mass of researchers toward the table.

Nkrumah, Jacques, and Saskia don’t follow her.

They bolt out of the exam room, slamming the door shut behind them.

It’s the right thing to do and they all should have done it.

There’s no protocol for a wild animal getting into the research station but if there was one, it would include the words run away fast . They’re all smart enough to know that.

Still, not everyone runs. Mads grabs hold of the tarp. Along with Kinsey and Domino, they clench the plastic into a loose bundle around the thing as it writhes, swinging it toward the exam table hard enough that they’re practically throwing it.

By some miracle it lands in the right place. It drops onto the exam table with all the heft of a waterlogged mattress. Mads and Domino each take an immediate step backward. The tarp is still folded loosely over the specimen, the plastic rising and falling fast as the creature pants beneath it.

It’s scared, Kinsey thinks. She’s breathing fast too.

The crinkling movement of the tarp is matched by a rhythmic sound that Kinsey only belatedly recognizes as the sound of Nkrumah tapping a finger against the thick glass of the exam room window.

Nkrumah, bossy and brisk, always safety-minded.

She’ll want to call some kind of meeting about how Mads and Kinsey and Domino didn’t leave the room.

She’ll want to agree on new rules, then print them out and laminate them and tape them to the exam room door.

1. When the monster we find beneath the desert sand turns out to be alive, we all get away from it.

A thick wet sound comes from beneath the tarp. Another choking cough. Nkrumah keeps tapping her finger on the glass, but Kinsey doesn’t give a shit about Nkrumah right now. The entire research station falls away. It’s just her and the specimen.

Kinsey steps toward it.

“Hey,” Mads pants, their voice a million miles away. “Hey, maybe don’t.”

They’re too late. Even if they weren’t, Kinsey would act like they were. She reaches out one trembling hand and lifts the folded-over tarp off the specimen.

It twists its head. The long snout angles toward her.

The damp dimpled nostrils flex as it searches for the smell of her.

Kinsey doesn’t move. She doesn’t know what she’s waiting for until the moment the specimen’s eyelids snap open.

There are no eyes in the sockets—only densely packed sand.

Still, when it turns toward Kinsey she feels something impossible, something she never gets to feel anywhere else.

She feels noticed .

“Hi,” she breathes.

The specimen lets out a low gurgle. A single red-and-black harvester ant wriggles free of the sand in the left eye socket, crawls down over the specimen’s cheek, makes its way down one leg of the exam table.

“Boss,” Domino says. At the sound of their voice, Kinsey feels the research station slam back into place around her. “Hey. Boss. We need to walk out of this room now, okay? ”

Kinsey nods. “Yeah. Okay.” She doesn’t take her eyes off the specimen.

“Kinsey,” Mads adds. “Now.”

She doesn’t make them drag her out of the room. She turns away on her own steam. As she opens the exam room door, she can feel the weight of the specimen’s eyeless gaze on her back.

Once the exam room door is shut behind them, Mads lets out a shaky breath. “Holy shit.”

“That thing’s alive,” Domino breathes. “How the hell is it alive?”

“Where did you find it again?”

“Like a hundred meters from the survey grid,” Domino answers.

“Under, I don’t know, two feet of sand? I started digging and the ground just kind of collapsed under me, and—Boss?

Are you okay?” They might as well be on the other side of the world, talking to Kinsey through a tin can. “She doesn’t look okay.”

Kinsey doesn’t answer. She brushes at a tickle on her neck and feels something small and damp roll beneath the weight of her touch.

She catches it between her fingers and when she brings her hand in front of her face, she realizes that she’s holding the half-mangled body of a harvester ant.

Maybe the same one that came out of the specimen’s eye socket, maybe not—there are always ants around the station.

Its antennae wave slowly, tasting her breath on the air.

Kinsey licks her lips, then tucks the ant into the pocket of her jeans.

“Team meeting,” she says at last. “Now.”