Page 4 of Spread Me

The meeting starts with all the usual formalities. Nkrumah yells about safety protocols and asks Domino whether they are or are no.

“a fucking idiot”; Saskia asks Nkrumah not to swear; Nkrumah swears again, more pointedly this time. Mads asks everyone to calm down. Domino sits silently with their arms folded, their eyes half-shut, their mouth pressed into a tight line. Jacques vomits into a trash can.

Kinsey knows how these things go. It’s all predictable, all self-contained. This part doesn’t require her intervention. Nkrumah always snaps at whoever she feels most recently rejected by. Saskia latches on to everyone’s tone, and acts wounded by all but the softest verbal caresses. Mads is infuriatingly, antagonistically reasonable. Domino seethes. Jacques vomits into a trash can.

She half listens to them, her forehead pressed to the glass of the little window that looks into the exam room, her skin tacky with half-dried sweat. Her gaze is fixed on the wire mesh that’s embedded in the glass. She wonders how they got it in there. Did the wire get sandwiched between two layers of glass, like a specimen being prepared for study? Or did the glass get poured over the wire, sealing it inside?

Either way, she wants that experience for herself. She wants to be the wire. Never corroding, never rusting, never plucked at by human fingers. A layer of glass between her and the world. Sealed away. That’s what she loves about this tiny wedge of a building she lives in: the miles of isolation on all sides of it. This place affords her a way to keep everything, everyone, at a hundred arms’ lengths.

Everyone except for her team, who drift around inside the research station like glitter in a snow globe, smacking into each other’s bodies and feelings with seemingly no direction or thought at all.

Beyond the wire, beyond the glass, inside the exam room, the specimen isn’t moving. Kinsey can’t tell if it’s still breathing. She wonders why she can’t seem to stop licking her lips.

“Let’s find out what the boss thinks.”

That’s Domino, right on time, breaking their sullen silence to appeal to Kinsey’s authority.

Kinsey turns to the team like a clockwork figurine that’s just been wound up.

“Nkrumah, quit yelling at everyone. Jacques, drink some water. Mads, either get shorter or sit down. Domino … can you go check Weatherman?”

“On it.”

Domino is already on their feet, headed down the hall toward the lab.

She lets her head fall back to rest against the glass, so she’s staring down her nose at her team. They’re sitting in the vestibule outside the exam room. It used to be dead space between spokes in the quarter-wheel of the station. The team knocked it out six months into their assignment, in a fit of ill-supervised restlessness. There’s a small round table in there that wobbles constantly, two mismatched folding chairs, a faded love seat with duct-tape patches on the cushions. The team is crammed into that nook—some sitting, some standing, all irritated.

Kinsey’s heart swells at the sight of them like a streambed in a flash flood. Their cheeks are flushed. Their eyes are bright. They’re electrified, all of them, with the spark of discovery.

The specimen did this to them, Kinsey thinks. The specimen did this for them. Everything she’s ever done—every blister that’s ever bubbled up on her sun-cooked shoulders, every scorpion she’s ever shaken out of her boot, every rule she’s ever broken—it’s all been worth it. For this. For them.

“Why is the specimen in here?”

Saskia asks. She’s chewing on her lip, jogging one knee fast enough to make the table vibrate. The zippers on the pockets of her cargo pants rattle.

“We aren’t even properly set up to examine it safely. All our PPE is inside the exam room with that fucking thing. We’re functionally helpless. Why’d we bring it full-in? Why expose ourselves to all that risk?”

Kinsey can’t even answer that question to herself, much less to Saskia.

“What matters now is what we do with it,”

she says instead.

“We’re not doing anything with it,”

Nkrumah insists.

“Oh no,”

Jacques groans, shortly before leaning over the trash can again.

Kinsey presses one hand to her forehead.

“Everyone shut up,”

she says.

“I need to think.”

Nkrumah scoffs.

“All due respect, your last thought gave us some kind of … fucking … Thing to deal with.”

Every eye in the room turns to her.

Kinsey points wordlessly at a jar on the little round table.

There’s a sticky note taped to the front of the jar with a ballpoint frowny face drawn on it.

A slot has been cut in the plastic lid. About five hundred dollars in small bills sit inside.

Nkrumah holds her hands out defensively.

“I didn’t.”

“You did,”

Mads says.

“We all heard you.”

“It’s a completely neutral pronoun!”

Saskia shakes her head.

“There was a capital letter on it. You know the rules. You reference the movie, you feed the jar.”

Nkrumah heaves a theatrical sigh, then stands and crosses to the folding table. She pulls a crumpled, sweat-softened five-dollar bill from her bra and drops it in.

All the money inside will eventually go to Sweet Ramona, the proprietor of the only bar in Boot Hill, the closest thing to a town within a hundred miles.

Every six months, the team piles into the Jeep and makes a pilgrimage to Sweet Ramona’s Taphouse to get shithoused toasting their isolation.

One by one, Kinsey asks each of them if they want to clock out.

For each person who says no, she buys the team a round.

After the fifth round, they all ask her if she wants to clock out.

When she says no, they hand the jar to Ramona herself; she’ll pour them a generous round of something off the dust-furred top shelf, they’ll leave her whatever’s left in the jar as an outrageously huge tip, and everyone will be hungover for three full days after.

Nkrumah doesn’t contribute to the jar often, but it’s impossible not to make John Carpenter references when you work at a research station in the middle of fucking nowhere.

Fair’s fair.

Mads takes Nkrumah’s seat while she’s up.

At the far end of the hall, the lab door opens.

Domino emerges, backlit by the red glow of Weatherman’s display.

They hold up two fists, their thumbs pointed down.

“It’s gonna be bad.”

“How bad?”

Jacques groans.

“Three days, minimum. This place is gonna be a dune by sunrise.”

The entire team responds in unison.

“Fuck you, Weatherman.”

“It’s just doing its job,”

Domino says loyally, even though they’d also cursed the satellite computer that keeps them all aware of incoming storm systems.

“What’d I miss?”

“Well, first things first,”

Mads says.

“What is that … animal?”

“A coyote,”

Jacques replies hoarsely.

“Coyotes don’t have six legs,”

Domino replies.

“And three tongues.”

A gust of wind rattles the base, and everyone looks up, as if they’ll be able to see the encroaching sandstorm through the ceiling. There’s no point being vigilant about something as inevitable and unpredictable as a wall of sand hurtling across the desert. But they’re all being vigilant anyway. They can’t help it. They’re just animals in a little box hoping to finish out the day without dying.

Kinsey keeps her eyes on the ceiling to prevent herself from looking through the exam room window again.

“We don’t know what the specimen is. But last time I checked, we’re scientists. Figuring this kind of thing out is what we’re here for,”

she says.

“We’ll document everything. Write a paper. Saskia and Nkrumah can do the conference circuit.”

“Why do they get to do the conference circuit?”

Mads grumbles.

Saskia aims a wink at Nkrumah.

“Because we’re a good team.”

Jacques heaves into the trash can again.

“Fucking hell, Jacques.”

Kinsey tries to make her voice playful, but it doesn’t work.

“Can you get it together?”

“Sorry,”

he says into the depths of the trash can.

“I don’t feel s’good.”

Mads frowns.

“You’re not usually still throwing up this late in the day.”

They look at him with what Kinsey thinks of as their doctor-face: watchful, assessing, a calculator made flesh.

“J, anything else going on with you? Do you have sunstroke?”

“Don’t think so?”

Jacques looks up blearily. His lips are white. Crimson circles like vaudeville rouge stain his already-ruddy cheeks. His eyes shine with an unwholesome glassiness.

Kinsey stares at him, yearning flooding her belly. She presses her thighs together hard. Stop it, she tells herself. Stop it stop it stop it.

Mads stands abruptly.

“Everybody out of this wing,”

they announce. “Now.”

Nkrumah doesn’t budge.

“What? Why?”

“Jacques made unprotected contact with the specimen, and now he has a fever,”

Mads says.

“You can’t know he has a fever just by looking.”

“I can and I do. That”—Mads says, pointing decisively at Jacques—“is a fever. We have to quarantine until we know if whatever he’s got is contagious. I’ll treat him, but the rest of you have to go.”

“But animal-to-human transmission is—”

“Not that rare, especially these days,”

Kinsey interrupts, her voice mortifyingly husky. She hopes they’ll all think she’s sick.

“Saskia, I believe your second doctoral thesis…?”

“Yes, that was my focus,”

Saskia says, her voice tight with restrained enthusiasm. Kinsey can tell she’s holding herself back, trying not to get too excited about the opportunity to discuss her deep interest in the subject—and she doesn’t entirely succeed at the effort.

“Kinsey’s right. Climate change has escalated the ability of viruses and fungal infections to achieve zoonotic spillover and—”

“Right,”

Kinsey cuts in. She knows she should let the team hear Saskia out, but she feels like she’s going to climb out of her skin with impatience.

“You all know the rules. The doc says the Q word, that’s it. If Domino read Weatherman right—”

“I did.”

“—then it sounds like that storm would keep us inside anyway. We’re under quarantine until further notice. Use the time to, I don’t know, meditate on the nature of lizards. Mads, you want me to run and grab you some gloves from the lab?”

Mads gives her a long look. They both know that Mads should be taking Jacques into the exam room, should be getting gloves and a mask from the drawers in there, should be leaving Jacques inside with a roll of duct tape so he can seal himself in with whatever illness is currently working its way through his system.

But they can’t do any of that, because the specimen is in the exam room, and the specimen is alive.

Saskia sways on her feet.

“Actually. Wow. I don’t feel great, either. I feel … weird.”

Mads releases Kinsey from the butterfly pin of their gaze.

“‘Weird’ means sick. If you feel weird, go to your quarters. Isolate as much as you can. The rest of us, the name of the game is ‘abundance of caution,’ yeah? Those of us who aren’t ill will drop food outside your doors every ten hours, but otherwise, we’ll avoid the residential wing as much as possible. We’ll sleep on the couches in the canteen tonight. We can use the lab bathroom.”

No one audibly groans at the prospect of using the strange, tiny toilet that sits behind a thin partition in the lab next to the eyewash station, but an aggrieved glance travels quickly around the room. Mads ignores it.

“Maybe if we isolate, whatever this is will only hit some of us.”

“Good plan,”

Kinsey says, trying not to talk too fast or seem too eager.

“I feel a little strange too. I’m going to head to my bunk. Domino, keep an eye on Weatherman as long as you can, yeah? Also, we should probably burn that shirt just to be safe. Toss it in the biohazard bin when you get a chance?”

Domino flips her a good-natured middle finger.

“Feel better, Boss.”

She nods to them.

“Good luck, team.”

Everyone veers off. Kinsey slips into her room.

The room is plain.

It’s a solo berth she managed to claim by default.

Even though she’s the only one in the room, it still has twin beds on opposite walls, one of which she uses as a makeshift shelf for the dune of binders that accumulate around every poor fool who ends up managing a research team.

Heavy blankets on both beds, two pillows on the one she sleeps in.

No windows, no closet.

There’s a scratchy jute rug on the floor, a wobbly flat-pack dresser with a too-bright lamp on top, a framed poster with a wide-angle photo of a desert that isn’t this one.

One wall radiates heat during the day because it’s got the desert on the other side of it.

She can hear the wind picking up through that wall. It’s getting more intense by the second—this storm is fast.

Her instincts were right, having everyone come inside. She’s sure of it. She’s less sure of her instincts about the specimen, but what’s done is done.

The second the door closes behind her, Kinsey takes that framed poster of a distant desert off the wall. There’s another, much smaller photo stuck to the back of the frame with paper lab tape. She peels the tape away carefully so as not to rip the paper on the back of the frame. It’s not difficult—she’s been removing and re-sticking this same photo for two months, and the tape’s morale is low. She’ll need to replace it soon, she knows.

But that doesn’t matter right now.

She turns the photo over with unspeakable relief.

She hasn’t recovered from the first flush of desire, which hit her at a bizarre, inopportune moment—when the specimen opened its eyes, when it seemed to look at her.

A mixed-up panic impulse, she figures.

The kind of thing that happens all the time.

Kinsey still remembers the neuropsych professor who taught her class the five F’s of adrenaline response: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and procreate.

In the nervous system, that professor said, fear and arousal are always going steady.

Still, it was jarring to experience that sudden, strange, misplaced lust when the specimen awoke.

It primed Kinsey’s proverbial pump.

It left her vulnerable.

She’s a strong person, but she’s not made of stone.

When Jacques looked up from his puke-filled trash can with such an obvious fever, when Saskia looked ready to faint, when Mads said the word quarantine—it was all too much.

Kinsey’s decision to isolate herself in her bedroom isn’t because she feels ill.

It’s just that she’s so horny she thinks she might die from it.

She collapses onto her bed with the photo in one hand.

Her lower lip is between her teeth already, her eyes locked on the black-and-white image.

It’s a famous picture in certain circles.

One of the finest examples of electron microscopy in the world.

A T2 bacteriophage.

The wind squeals against the walls of the station as Kinsey stares hungrily at the photo of the virus.

The long, slim, spidery fibers it uses to quest for a host splay out at wanton angles.

A thick, sturdy, rodlike sheath connects the fibers at one end of the bacteriophage to the capsid on the other, like a body connects legs to a head.

The multifaceted capsid looks for all the world like the candy sphere of a lollipop.

It’s perfect.

She drinks in the stretch of those fibers.

The stunning geometry of the capsid.

She imagines herself as an unsuspecting bacterium—the feel of the virus grasping her with its fibers, the sudden shock of penetration when it slides its sheath through her cell wall, the invasive rush of nucleic acid being injected into her.

She thinks of what it would feel like when that genetic material started replicating inside of her, changing her, taking her over—the heat, the hum, the rising tide of infection.

This is all she wants.

This is all she’s ever wanted.

The wind outside is howling now, a low air-raid drone.

The wall of her room shivers as the first real gust of sand hits it.

She unbuttons her jeans and shoves them down around her thighs, her eyes locked onto the photo.

The denim digs into the soft meat of her skin, keeps her from being able to spread her legs too far.

She knows that this is how it would feel to be restrained by strong bacteriophage fibers.

Transfixed.

Unable to escape.

When she pushes her pinched thumb and forefinger inside of herself, she imagines them as belonging to something transformative, grotesque, peregrine.

No lover has ever fingered her this way—she loves it because of how alien it feels, how inhuman.

She bites her own shoulder to muffle a cry as she thinks of the virus shooting itself into her just like this.

Careless.

Invasive.

Trying to make her into something more like itself. Changing her. Alien. Relentless. Irresistible.

She’s close, so close, when she feels something strange—a tickle on her hipbone, like a trailing hair.

She almost ignores it—she’s right there—but then she glances down and sees it.

The harvester ant from the specimen.

She’d shoved it into her pocket, truly unthinking in that panicked moment, muscle memory guiding her hand.

Now, it drags its half-crushed body across her skin.

The ant’s antennae wave drunkenly as it charts a path across her hipbone, toward the wet ache between her legs.

The storm outside rises to a high scream.

Kinsey doesn’t breathe.

She relaxes her eyes, presses her thumb and forefinger together tighter inside herself, lets her vision blur—and the ant stops looking like an ant.

The slender expanse of its thorax looks cylindrical for a moment, the questing node of its head looks gemlike, the now-useless legs it drags behind it take on the trailing elegance of bacteriophage fibers.

It pulls itself across her flesh toward the shady refuge of her groin.

Kinsey watches it with half-lidded eyes and fucks herself deeper, rougher, hard enough that the knuckle at the base of her thumb aches.

She dips her chin so she can clench her teeth around a mouthful of shirt collar.

She rides a cresting wave, the feel of the ant and her pulsing fingers and her own bucking hips turning her animal.

It rips through her like lightning.

She bites back a cry, her wrist slamming down onto the soft mound of her pubis as she rises to meet the orgasm.

The freight-train scream of the sandstorm striking the base covers the noise she can’t make herself hold in.

She’s faintly aware of a pinpoint sensation beneath the skin of her inner arm—the ant, wriggling desperately.

Trapped between her and her pleasure.

She ignores it, thrusts against herself again and again, still coming, still coming, still coming.

The ant dies before she’s finished.

She falls asleep to the sound of the screaming sand bearing down on her, one hand still tucked between her legs, the other still clutching the photo of the bacteriophage.

By the time she wakes up, everyone on her team has entered isolation.