Page 23 of Spread Me
“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 the bumpy 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 even though 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.”
She shakes her head. “Please.”
“I don’t understand.”
The barest hint of frustration enters Domino’s voice. They shimmy down the wall more, reach out to grasp the doorframe with long, flat fingers.
“There’s nowhere you love more than this. There’s nobody you want more than me. Tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you. This doesn’t have to be hard.”
The doorknob behind Kinsey rattles.
“Give us a minute,”
Domino calls.
“You’ll let them in, won’t you, Kinsey?”
Kinsey forces herself to look away from Domino. The stack of keycards digs into the soft meat of her fingers—she grips them until they creak, terrified of dropping them before she has a chance to unlock the exterior door. She whips the flashlight from corner to corner, looking for something she can use. The flickering beam falls on abandoned clothes and boots, notebooks and detritus, none of it heavy or sharp or useful at all.
“I’m not letting you leave,”
Domino says behind her.
“Not until you tell me why you don’t want to stay. And don’t say it’s to warn people. That’s a lie, and we both know it.”
Kinsey turns back to them, and this time, she points the flashlight beam directly onto them.
The light illuminates the fullness of what they’ve become.
It’s a perfect, massive facsimile of the lichen’s microscopic structure.
Arms and legs frill around a wide net of body parts, lips and labia and nipples and ears all strung together across a sticky web of flesh.
Lacelike fingers and toes tassel out to stick the creature to the wall.
Grains of sand and pearly beads of moisture collect at the places where the long strands of skin intersect.
Kinsey can’t tell if the liquid is sweat or tears or plasma or pure slick pleasure.
The creature’s musk fills the airlock, more invasive and inescapable with every second, and Kinsey understands what it tried to tell her when it was pretending to be Domino.
She can taste it on the air, just as it swore it could taste her. She can taste its desire. Her tongue curls inside her mouth, seeking more even as she desperately searches for a means of escape.
The creature has spread itself across the door, and it watches Kinsey, waiting patiently for her reply. The doorknob rattles again.
“One more minute,”
Domino calls.
“Why?!”
The voice on the other side of the door is Saskia’s, and it’s impatient.
“Go let them in,”
Domino murmurs.
“They want you. I want you.”
“But I don’t want this,”
Kinsey hisses.
“Bullshit.”
It draws itself inward even further, consolidating the matrix of flesh into a tighter mesh.
“Of course you want me. I can feel it, Kinsey. And—and I saw you,” they add.
Kinsey shakes her head. “Saw—?”
The head that wears Domino’s face rotates. It stretches toward her, sand hissing off it in streams.
“I saw the way you looked at me when you brought me inside. I saw the way you blushed when I looked back at you. I heard you fucking yourself, over and over again, while I was making my home inside your colleagues. I felt the way you responded when I touched you. Kinsey, come on,”
it pleads.
“Stop playing this game.”
She wets her lips.
“I don’t want this,”
she says softly. The thing between her and the door opens its mouth, but she cuts it off.
“No, don’t—don’t interrupt. I’m telling you the truth, and I want you to tell the others, too. This—all of this,”
she adds, gesturing behind her to include the creature with Mads’s body, the thing that’s shaped like Nkrumah, the remains of Jacques’s corpse.
“I don’t want it.”
“But—”
“I want you,”
she says, and saying it feels like ripping a fishhook out of the root of her own tongue.
“I want you as you are. I don’t want this, this, this—”
She can’t find a word for it, settles for simply holding out a hand toward the mess that wears her dead colleagues’ tongues and cocks and cunts like jewelry.
“I know you’re trying your hardest to be what I want. I know you think I’m some kind of puzzle to be solved. But I’m not that. I don’t want tricks and surprises and new shapes. I don’t want to feel like I’m fucking someone else!”
She’s yelling now, her eyes burning with angry tears. She’s never fought with a lover before. It’s awful and it’s wonderful, the truth carving its way free of her on a wave of strange hot fury.
“I don’t want Saskia or Domino or Mads! I’ve never wanted them!”
“Kinsey,”
the thing on the wall ventures, but Kinsey’s momentum is too powerful and she cuts it off again.
“If I wanted them, I would have fucked them! You stupid fucking thing!”
She swings at it with the flashlight, misses.
“I’ve never fucked myself thinking about them, I’ve never lost sleep over them, why would you think I want them when I only want you!”
She swings again, catches a strand of flesh with the very end of the flashlight. There’s a snag and a snap and the creature releases a strained cry of pain.
“You think you saw me? You don’t know what you saw! I looked at you and felt something real, and I knew we couldn’t be together, I knew you couldn’t ever want me back, and I was okay with it! I was used to it! But this?”
She lets out a laugh, feels the spill of tears on her cheeks.
“This is worse than nothing. You’ve given me everything but what I want. You’ve made a grotesque fucking joke of what we could have been. I don’t want this,”
she says one last time.
“I. Want. To. Leave.”
With that, she swings the flashlight at them again. This time she hits center mass. The heavy metal of the flashlight strikes the dense web of tissue. Domino screams, a piercing shriek like wind whipping through the desert at night, a coyote-howl of pain. Kinsey wrenches her arm back and then swings again, tearing through the network of flesh. No, she realizes—it only seems like flesh. It’s a close facsimile, but the fungus can’t repair itself fast enough to disguise the spongy give of densely connected hyphae.
She swings the flashlight again and again, pounding the creature in front of her until it hangs in shreds, and it’s only when the thing stops screeching that she realizes she’s screaming, too.
“I don’t want you,”
Kinsey replies breathlessly.
“Not any of you. Not after what you’ve done.”
She feels behind her back, groping her way through the mash that’s left of Domino until her hand finds the stripe of metal that is the exterior door handle.
“You’re making a mistake,”
a voice says from behind the interior door.
“There’s nothing for you out there.”
She shakes her head, pressing the stack of keycards to the reader until it flashes green.
“That’s where you’re wrong.”
And with that, she opens the door and flees the station, her feet pounding against the sand as she makes her way to the Jeep, to the desert.
To freedom.