Fresh Ink: "Meet Cute" by Malinda Lo

Nic watched surreptitiously as the black girl in the red wig and black pantsuit, FBI badge clasped to the lapel, got in line behind her.

Scully gestured to the Starfleet insignia on Nic’s shirt.

Nic stifled a laugh while the guys gaped at Scully.

They were no match for poised and sweetly vicious putdowns from a pretty girl.

"Ow!" Tamia said indignantly.

The undercurrent of anxiety in her began to intensify.

They instinctively moved closer together, shoulders touching.

The footsteps were odd, though. They squelched irregularly across the floor, like rain-soaked sneakers worn by someone with a limp.

The concourse was deserted, and none of the lights were on, but the floor-to-ceiling windows let in a watery gray daylight.

Through the deluge, she saw the airport lit up in the distance.

“Hey, isn’t Agent Scully a physicist?”
“Yeah, why? She wrote her thesis on Einstein’s twin paradox. Time travel, basically. She thought it could be possible, theoretically.”

In the quiet between them, the sound of rain pounding against the windows was a constant staccato.

It was an amorphous grayish-greenish blob edged with stiff hairs like giant eyelashes, and as it wobbled across the empty concourse toward them, it left a slimy trail on the floor.

“But viruses are microscopic, even Megaviruses," Tamia said dubiously. “You look like—you’re like the Thing or something. The Blob. Weren’t those movies from the fifties?”

“I drenched them in this goo—it was from a Ghostbusters costume kit. I wanted to represent cytoplasm. But it makes walking around kind of gross.”

Nic suppressed a sigh.

On the walk to the east concourse, Wesley regaled Tamia and Nic with the history of the Megavirus, also known as Megavirus chilensis, never letting either of them get a word in edgewise.

She glanced at Nic, who seemed a little subdued.

Tamia smiled tentatively.

Past the zombies—there were always zombies—and beyond the Star Trek contingent and the Gryffindor quidditch team, she finally saw the girl in a red Agent Scully wig.