Page 22 of Spread Me

Domino is unpacking. They’re nearly done. They pull a shirt and a pair of scissors out of the bottom of their duffel. The shirt is pink. They slip it on and start cutting it across the belly to make it a crop top.

“What does that say?”

Kinsey asks from her seat on the second bed in their room.

“Is that a baseball team or—”

She stops short as she makes sense of the cursive letters across the chest.

“It says Baby Slut,”

Domino replies, their voice slightly muffled as they bow their neck to get a better view of the scissors.

A laugh startles out of Kinsey without her permission.

“What the fuck?”

she breathes. “Why?!”

“It’s a joke from, um.”

They snip off a loose curl of cotton.

“From online. About Kurt Russell in The—”

Jacques appears in the door to Domino’s room. “Careful,”

he warns.

“She’ll make you put cash in the jar.”

Domino looks up.

“Sorry, I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Domino. What’s the jar?”

“Jacques. The jar is Kinsey’s cruel punishment to prevent us from having fun while we’re here. Nice shirt,”

he adds, looking Domino up and down.

“I don’t see what this shirt has to do with the jar,”

Kinsey insists.

“But either way, it’s definitely not lab or field appropriate. Have fun wearing it in your room and the canteen, I guess.”

Domino finishes cutting off the bottom half of the shirt and grins up at her.

“Sure thing, Boss. Whatever you say.”

***

Kinsey slams the door to Mads’s room behind her. The hallway is half-dark. In the bathroom at the far end of the hall, the always-on fluorescents buzz. The walls creak under the onslaught of the still-raging sandstorm. She runs, her bare feet skidding on the linoleum as she hurls herself toward Nkrumah’s room. She slips on a drift of sand, nearly falls, catches herself. Doesn’t look back.

“Nkrumah!”

She slaps her palms against the thin particleboard of Nkrumah’s door.

“Nkrumah, wake up!”

“I’m awake,”

Nkrumah calls from inside.

Kinsey looks over her shoulder, sees the shadow of the Mads-specimen-creature at the other end of the hall. It’s on all fours, silhouetted by the light from the bathroom. She can’t see its face but she knows it’s looking at her. She always knows when it’s looking at her.

“Let me in,”

she yells.

“Let me in right now!”

The reply from inside is a purr.

“It’s not locked.”

Kinsey freezes with her hand halfway to the knob. There was no impatience in Nkrumah’s voice, no snap, no bite. Something’s wrong.

“Kinsey?”

Nkrumah calls again from inside the room.

“Are you coming in?”

Kinsey takes a step backward. A lamp-click from inside the bedroom, a spill of buttery light through the crack under the closed door. She glances down the hall, catches the shape of the creature out of the corner of her eye—it hasn’t moved, hasn’t chased her. She’s going to run, she’s already decided. Nkrumah is a lost cause, but Jacques—maybe Jacques is still safe. She’s going to sprint for the Jeep and scoop up Jacques on her way, and the two of them will get as far from the station as possible before sounding the alarm. Maybe the two of them can make it out of this.

But then she hears a second voice from inside the room. It sounds like Jacques.

“Is that Kinsey?”

“It sure is,”

Nkrumah calls from the other side of the door.

“Kinsey?!”

His voice is raw and ragged. Kinsey’s body answers before her mind can form a thought. She crashes toward the door, her body slamming into it even as the knob turns under her hand, her momentum carrying her into the room with so much force that she falls headlong into Nkrumah’s arms.

“Woah there!”

Nkrumah laughs, a light sweet giggle that makes Kinsey’s stomach drop. Nkrumah, the real Nkrumah, has never laughed like that in her life.

“You okay? You look—”

“No,”

Kinsey says, clawing her way up Nkrumah’s thin nightshirt to stand upright.

“No, don’t talk to me, don’t say anything. I don’t want to hear it. Jacques? Are you in here?”

Nkrumah shifts so her body takes up Kinsey’s entire field of vision.

“He’s fine, don’t worry about him. Do you want to shut the door?”

“No,”

Kinsey says, trying hard to shove Nkrumah out of the way. It doesn’t work. She seems rooted to the floor, a boulder dropped in the middle of this bedroom by a glacier a million years ago. She is part of this place. She will not move.

Nkrumah catches Kinsey’s hands, folds them between her own.

“It’s okay. You don’t have to do anything,”

she says, smiling, bending her head low to look into Kinsey’s eyes.

“I promise.”

Kinsey shakes her head, uncomprehending.

“What? What does that mean?”

“I get it now,”

Nkrumah says. Sand brims in her eyes, spills down over her cheeks.

“I’m sorry I had it so wrong before.”

“I’m sorry I scared you,”

Mads’s voice echoes from the hallway.

Kinsey whips around. The creature is behind her now. It’s still in the hall, not crossing the threshold, but it’s too close, and she knows she’s trapped.

“I won’t make that mistake again,”

Nkrumah whispers, sand gathering at the corners of her mouth.

“Just stay right there. You don’t have to do anything,”

she repeats.

“Where’s Jacques?”

Kinsey’s voice comes out low and shaky.

“I heard him in here.”

“It’s okay. He’s fine. Me and Domino brought him inside and cleaned him up hours ago.”

Nkrumah turns—no, rotates, the top half of her body turning out of rhythm with the bottom half, her legs only belatedly unlocking themselves from the floor.

“You just stay there. We came up with a plan you’re going to love.”

Nkrumah glides away and finally, with her out of the way, Kinsey can see Jacques.

Nkrumah’s twin bed has been dragged to the center of the room. It’s been stripped, the bedding dumped onto the floor in an unceremonious puddle. Jacques lies in the center of the bed.

He is unmistakably dead. His limbs are limp—ankles crossed, wrists tucked up to his chest. His body is curled into a loosely fetal parenthesis, his head tilted backward at an unsurvivable angle.

As Kinsey watches, frozen, Nkrumah climbs onto the bed and pushes at Jacques’s shoulder until he flops onto his back.

“Don’t—”

she starts.

“Hush.”

A heavy hand falls onto her shoulder—the creature is in the room now, right behind her, too close to ignore.

“We understand now. We understand everything.”

“It’s not that you don’t want me,”

Nkrumah says, pulling her nightshirt off in one fluid movement. She looks over her shoulder, the corners of her grin curling up like burning paper. The virus has replicated her perfectly. Every detail is accurate, right down to the stretch marks that pearlesce across her hips and breasts.

“It’s just that you prefer to watch,”

the creature says with Mads’s voice.

“That’s okay. It’s better than okay.”

Kinsey shakes her head. “No,”

she says.

“that’s not what—”

“It’s okay,”

Jacques says. His head rolls from one side to the other, the movement of his neck loose and uncontrolled.

“Kinsey, you don’t have to keep pretending you don’t want me. Nobody’s here except us. And I promise,”

he adds, tipping his head at a further angle so Kinsey can’t avoid seeing the white film over his eyes.

“We all want this to happen just as much as you do.”

“Everyone wants the same things you want,”

Nkrumah says, a new rasp in her voice. She spits a dark clot of wet sand into one palm. Reaches down to grip Jacques. Kinsey catches a glimpse of the thick, rigid line of his cock before it’s swallowed by Nkrumah’s fist. “See?”

His hips lift to meet her. She works the length of him with quick, fluid tugs. Kinsey can hear the shifting scrape of wet sand on taut flesh.

“See?”

Jacques repeats, thrusting up into Nkrumah’s hand, matching her rhythm perfectly.

“See?”

the creature asks, pressing Mads’s body against Kinsey’s back, nudging her ear with the damp sponge of its nose.

“This isn’t what I want,”

Kinsey whispers.

But the truth is that she doesn’t know what she wants. She can feel her body responding to the virus. She can feel herself softening and spreading and yearning for it, for the way it’s taken everyone as its own, for the invasion and transformation and manipulation.

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’ll feel 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.