The Grinding

by Dinniman, Matt

  THE GRINDING

  MATT DINNIMAN

  Kindle Edition

  Necro Publications

  — 2013 —

  — | — | —

  THE GRINDING © 2013 by Matt Dinniman

  Cover art © 2013 by Erik Wilson

  This edition © 2013 Necro Publications

  ISBN: 978-1-939065-33-9

  Assistant Editors:

  Amanda Baird

  C. Dennis Moore

  Tara Cleves

  Book design & typesetting:

  David G. Barnett

  Fat Cat Graphic Design

  www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com

  a Necro Publication

  5139 Maxon Terrace

  Sanford, FL 32771

  www.necropublications.com

  This is Book 7 in the Necro Fresh Flesh Series.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  — | — | —

  To the city I left behind.

  — | — | —

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PART 1

  PART 2

  PART 3

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  — | — | —

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Let’s forget all this fourth wall bullshit and get to the point. You’re the reader, and I know you’re there. We’re supposed to pretend like neither of us exist, but if you’re going to trust me, we can’t start this off with our backs facing each other. My name is Adam, and I want you to look right into my eyes. This isn’t going to be a one-way exchange, no sir. It’s not fair to me, it’s not fair to Nif, and it’s not fair to you. I’m here. You’re here. And this is what really fucking happened the day they nuked Tucson.

  Nif and I were there. We saw it begin. You may think you know what happened. You watch the news, follow the internet, and maybe you read that dumb book by the guy who wasn’t even there, and that gave you this feeling like you know what went down first-hand. But you don’t know. You can’t know. Unless you were there too, you don’t know shit.

  So here’s the scene. We’re in a small arena. It’s a roller derby bout. Tons of people, but the only important characters right now are me; my wife, Nif; and her cousin, Cece.

  “What is that?” asked Cece. She sat next to Nif and me in the stands, and she’d been staring hard at something for a while, her clove cigarette clinging dangerously to her bottom lip. I watched the cigarette, counting down to the inevitable dive of ash straight into the hair of one of the let’s-be-edgy-and-go-to-the-roller-derby sorority girls sitting in front of us.

  Cece was a sturdy, box-shaped girl, a roller derby queen on and off the rink. Her derby name was “Peaches and Scream,” and everybody called her “Peaches.” Only me and Nif called her by her real name. About a month before, Cece’s leg was busted in two places in a spectacular, skates-over-head collision with the jammer for the Demon City Sallies. She now sported one of those casts that made her walk like a mummy. It forced a temporary vacation from roller derby. But my wife’s cousin never missed a bout, and she wore that cast like a heavyweight championship belt.

  Cece stood heavily. “I’m gonna go check it out.” She clomped her way down the stands toward whatever had caught her attention below. I looked at the ponytail in front of Nif and me. Not a single ash had fallen on the girl’s head. I glanced to where Cece headed, but I didn’t see anything.

  “Damn,” I said.

  “What?” Nif asked.

  I nodded toward the stairs. “Your cousin is all worked up about something.”

  “What else is new?” Nif said, twisting in her seat. She scratched her arm. My wife seemed more distracted than usual tonight.

  On stage, another scene played out. The halftime band, a local punk group, couldn’t get the PA system to work. Feedback blared, and the crowd booed and threw cups at the bewildered band. This was the first time I had seen them, and I could tell they weren’t used to the surly crowds.

  “I almost feel sorry for them,” Nif said, scratching some more at her arm.

  “What’s their name again?” I asked. They all wore T-shirts with something hand-written on them, but I couldn’t tell what they said from where we sat. The first word started with a “P,” the second a “V.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You won’t remember.”

  A scream perforated the stadium.

  Just like that. A scream, and the world changed forever.

  This was a scream unlike anything I had ever heard. I thought maybe it was a cat at first. This was an unforgettable scream, high-pitched and piercing, sounding amplified even though it wasn’t—one of those sounds that causes every person who hears it to stop and look with dread.

  I stopped. I looked with dread.

  It wasn’t a cat.

  I hadn’t seen where Cece went, but I saw her now. She stumbled backward on the track, tripping onto her ass, clawing at her face as she screamed. Her cast boomed when it hit the floor. She had something wrapped around her neck and on her head, like a mask. The pink and fleshy thing pulsated, a blob of living Silly Putty. As we watched, the pink color grew brighter, matching Cece’s Bombers jersey. The mass grew, covering more of her face. She screamed again, and a tendril of the blob snaked its way into her mouth, cutting her scream off cold.

  This was not a typical halftime prank. Holy shit, no. Something was wrong. Cece rolled onto her stomach and twitched, the mass growing over the top of her head and down her back, covering the ‘Peaches’ on her jersey until the whole top half of her body disappeared.

  The ponytail and her friends screamed. They ran, falling over themselves.

  “The hell?” I said, jumping to my feet. Nif and I looked at each other. We both ran toward Cece. Half the crowd rushed toward her, the other half away, and the crush caught us. I reached and grabbed Nif’s skinny wrist, holding her close to me, and she wrapped her other arm around my waist, swearing at everyone, screaming for them to get the hell away.

  Through the crowd, I watched as a girl—Panda-Monium, a pivot and the captain for the Punky Bruisers—grabbed Cece’s good leg. The moment she did, her body went rigid, like a goddamned Medusa statue. She fell to the ground, her hand still clamped on Cece’s ankle. Other roller derby girls crashed into Panda-Monium, and when any of them came into contact with her, they also froze. In a matter of five seconds, a glob of thirty people formed on the track and spilled over into the sidelines. The moment anyone touched the group, even through clothes, they became a part of it, frozen in place.

  I stopped dead. Still on the bleachers, I pulled Nif back.

  “Don’t get any closer,” I yelled over the screams.

  “What the hell?” she said, trying to pull away. “She’s my cousin, Adam.”

  She didn’t yet see what was going on, but many had, and the fearful and confused now surged away from the track and toward the exit. I watched as the band’s bass player fell to the ground. He kicked at a trapped girl near him. As he scrambled away, his foot slipped, and his ankle became attached to her neck.

  Band mates tried to pull him away, only to be caught themselves. Soon a chain of bodies snaked across the track and into the middle of the center stage, with a dog pile around where Cece fell.

  By now, enough people had cleared away that Nif could see what was happening. Everyone continued to stream out of the small arena, a
nd in the distance, a police siren wailed.

  “We gotta find a way to get to her,” Nif said, pulling toward the track. I couldn’t see Cece anymore under the pile of motionless people.

  “No,” I said. “We don’t know what’s going on. The police are coming.”

  Nif was only five feet tall. She weighed 95 pounds, if that. I should’ve been able to hold onto her. If I had been stronger, if I had used both of my damn hands, if I had been more insistent and kept her away, you wouldn’t be reading this right now. Everything would’ve been different. I would’ve pulled her out of that building. I would’ve gotten us into our car and driven away.

  But that’s not what happened. I wish more than anything in the world it was.

  She twisted out of my grip, and she got away from me. She bounded down the stands toward her cousin.

  Chapter 2

  I’m taking a dramatic pause right now because I have tell you a few things before we get to the most fucked-up part of this story.

  Like I said, my name is Adam. I am 24 years old now, and I was 23 on that night last November. I’m half Irish, half Filipino if such a thing matters. I look like a tall, dark-haired white guy, and nobody ever guesses I have anything other than purebred ‘Merican in me.

  According to all the records, I’m dead. If you look at that memorial that alphabetically lists all the people who died that night and the following morning, you’ll see an assload of Adams listed on there. I’m the third one. Nif and Cece are both on there, too. Nif is listed right underneath me, but they put her as “Jennifer.”

  Everything you’ve heard about the Grinder is bullshit. Pure, simple bullshit. They don’t know what they’re talking about, those college-educated bozos on TV who’ve written whole books based on nothing but the thousands of YouTube videos people posted after that night. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the Kyl Commission’s initial findings. In fact, the only one who came close was that crazy asshole on The 700 Club who blabbered about demons and abortion and gay marriage. And even he wasn’t that close.

  Don’t believe the reports that say it came from the science lab at the university. Or it rose from the reservation. Or came up from Mexico. They’re all wrong. I was there. I saw the damn thing born.

  Most importantly, I know what it was. I know why it was here. You take every scary-ass theory from the past six months, and you roll them into a ball to make the freakiest, most terrifying thing you can think of, and you still won’t even be close.

  But we’ll get to that. First, I have tell you more about Nif. I may be writing this in first person, but she’s the main character here. Don’t ever forget that.

  This is Nif’s story.

  Jennifer. She hated that name, so we all called her ‘Nif.’ I won’t say everything was perfect between us, because it wasn’t, but at the end of every day, we slept in the same bed, we kissed each other good night, and we both thought that we were going to spend the rest of our lives together. We didn’t have kids, but we had a ferret named Hamlet. Nif had tattoos and smoked just about anything available to smoke, and she was addicted to God, punk rock, and roller derby, in that order.

  She didn’t compete in the roller derby herself. Her bones would’ve snapped like her cousin’s leg the first time someone knocked her onto the floor. But she was friends with pretty much everyone involved in the local scene, and she never missed a bout, dragging me with her.

  Nif and I were in school together since the 10th grade, but we didn’t date until my senior year, and not until after she had dropped out. We worked together at Big Shot Chicken. I was shift manager, well on my way to take over the chicken-roasting world. Yeah, I was one of those guys. Straight-laced, did my homework, dotted my I’s and crossed my T’s. I had watched my dad fuck up my family’s world, and I was determined to do the exact opposite.

  It’s funny; Nif had the same deal with her dad. The man was a genuine war hero, a pillar of society, the type of guy who won community awards and actually deserved them. The only thing he ever really screwed up was Nif.

  She hated him for it. To this day, I don’t know what he did to make her hate him. I asked her once, and she started to cry like you wouldn’t believe. “I don’t know either,” she said. But by then, it was too late. This was at her mom’s funeral, and her dad had been dead a year.

  The fast food gig, for me, was for my scholarship applications, show I could hold a job. My family wasn’t rich, so I had to go through the whole financial aid and scholarship crucible. The college gatekeepers liked things like track team, honor roll, chess club. Shift manager of a hole-in-the-wall chicken restaurant.

  For Nif, the job paid the rent on her shitty little apartment. She was only 17, but she lived by herself. Her mom had figured 17 was close enough, and took off while her dad was out of town. He didn’t even know where Nif lived, though he came into Big Shot sometimes to try to talk to her and give her money. She wouldn’t talk to him, but she would take the money.

  I was a total asshole manager. I remembered Nif from school, but she didn’t remember me, and that made me mad. It made me mad because she was one of those people you instantly recognized, someone you noticed when she was gone, and I had noticed when she’d dropped out of school the year before. For fuck’s sake, I sat right behind her in Spanish two years in a row, and she didn’t know me when she got hired.

  She looked at me like she’d never seen me before.

  This one night, we were the only two closing up the restaurant, and I was chewing her ass for not cleaning off the tables in the dining room. I was ready to go, and she’d spent the last ten minutes fucking with the radio because the DJ had promised to play a Bad Brains song. She was all excited because they never played that shit on the radio. I pointed out she had the CD sitting right there, but it didn’t matter. “It’s different when it’s on the radio,” she said.

  “Yeah, it’s not as good,” I said.

  “You know what, go fuck yourself,” she said. “People like you won’t ever understand.”

  “Yeah, and people like you will spend your whole life waiting by the radio, when you got the CD sitting right there.”

  She paused then, just looking at me, noticing me. We’d known each other for three years, we’d worked together for six months, and I’d finally gotten her attention. I even felt a little triumphant right then. But then she opened her mouth, and both of our lives changed forever.

  “You either fire me or fuck me. That’s the only way you’ll get me away from this radio,” she said, leaning back against the wall. She pulled out a cigarette and lit it right there.

  “But…but,” I stammered. I was never bad with words, except when I talked to her. I never even thought I liked her in that way until she said it. She wasn’t my circle. She was unique, an anomaly. I never thought we existed in a universe where she and I would get together. I wasn’t going to fire her. Maybe write her up, but not fire her. I couldn’t even fire her if I wanted. I didn’t know what the hell to say. “I don’t have a condom,” I said.

  She laughed and took a long drag on the cigarette. She let the smoke seep out her nose, and I swear that cloud filled the entire ceiling of the restaurant like a storm.

  “Either you’re a pussy, or you think I’m dirty. Which one is it?”

  I was so out of my element. I don’t even remember what I said.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” she said, putting down her cigarette.

  We fucked right there on the table. Right where we make the chicken.

  I wasn’t a virgin, not by a long shot. I’d spent my whole junior year in a highly dysfunctional, insanely sexual relationship with a girl from the chess team.

  Nif, however, was a virgin, and that blew my mind.

  She had what seemed like hundreds of boyfriends. A parade of them, all tattooed and older. They came into the store every day to talk to her when she was supposed to be working. Those guys were her circle. But she’d never had sex with any of them. She chose me, seemingly on a whim
. Just like that. I didn’t understand.

  We didn’t get together right after that. After that night, she pretended like it had never happened, and we went back to our old routine of me being the asshole, and her being the unruly, I-don’t-give-a-shit employee.

  But as much as she pretended, things were different. She stopped letting guys come over to the store, and sometimes, in my peripheral, I’d catch her watching me, but when I turned, she looked away.

  Part of me wanted to never talk to her again. I had no plans on staying in Tucson, and I just knew hooking up with someone like her would keep me here. I knew what my friends would say. Stay away from her. What’re you thinking, man?

  Nobody would guess we were a couple, at least not back when we first got together. I looked like what I was—a chess team nerd who corrected the chemistry teacher when he made a mistake.

  And Nif? She was a punk-rock, skater girl to the core: full of piss and vinegar and fuck-you, even with her fine features like a porcelain doll you’d see for sale in the Sunday newspaper leaflet. Half Mexican and half white, she dyed her brown hair midnight black. So black, it would blend with the night sky, and she was just a disembodied, glowing white face. She always wore these striped, knee-high stockings and Doc Martin boots that weighed as much as she did. Everywhere she walked, her footsteps boomed, but she made it look graceful. When she walked into a room, you knew she was there.

  And when she ran toward her cousin that night, when everything was still contained within the roller derby arena, everyone turned to watch her run. That’s just how it was with Nif. She moved, people noticed.