The Grinding

by Dinniman, Matt

  I just stared at her, my brain not processing her words. She might as well have said, “I’ve spontaneously grown a penis.” My brain rebooted. “What? When?”

  “More than a year ago,” she said. “I got pregnant after that first time.”

  I stammered. “I…what?” I always wore a condom, and she was on the pill, too. She insisted on the double protection. She was paranoid about getting pregnant.

  At that, she burst into tears, and words just poured out of her. “I didn’t want to fuck up your life. I was always jealous of you. I wanted to be like you. You were going to college. You were going to be somebody. But I knew you weren’t some asshole, that you would never leave me if you knew I had a baby coming. So I got rid of it. Rid of them…” She sniffled again. “They were twins.”

  I started to respond, but she kept talking, “But you didn’t leave, and I fucked up your life anyway.”

  I went round to sit next to her in the booth and put my arms around her.

  “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,” I said.

  She sobbed and grabbed my jacket, burying her face.

  “I love you,” I whispered into her ear. I meant it, too. “I don’t care if you had an abortion. I wish you had told me earlier, but it doesn’t change anything. You haven’t fucked up my life. I didn’t know what I wanted or who I was until I met you. You helped me find myself.”

  She wrapped her arms around my waist and held onto me so tight, it hurt. She cried and cried.

  “Remember rule number two,” I said.

  She cried for a long time, and I didn’t say anything else.

  She finally looked up at me, her face streaked with mascara. “You either marry me or dump me. That’s the only way you’re going to get me to let go of you right now.”

  So I married her.

  We were both 19. We got into my car, drove the 450 miles to Las Vegas, and we got married by a black Elvis impersonator at the first chapel we found. We went to some government place to make it official, then we drove home and announced it to all of our friends.

  Sometimes I think about how things would’ve been if we’d kept the babies. Twins. Holy cow. We weren’t ready. Hell, we weren’t ready to get married, either. But I think we would’ve managed okay.

  Nif thought about the babies a lot, too. It ate her up inside.

  By the time she was 20, several of our friends were having kids. I could see it in Nif’s eyes every time she looked at one of her pregnant friends. She was thinking about what could’ve been.

  We both wanted kids, but we both wanted to wait until we were older and made more money. And were less stupid.

  Like with the drugs.

  I smoked weed, but not too often. I tried heroin once. Acid three times. Cocaine a number of times. I never saw the big deal, then again, I never got addicted.

  Nif smoked a whole lot more than I did. And while I think weed should be legalized and all that, I don’t think anyone would disagree that you shouldn’t be doing that stuff around a baby.

  So we decided to wait. We both had a lot of growing up to do, and we didn’t want to risk screwing up a kid. As it turned out, Nif had more growing up to do than I thought.

  Meth.

  Fucking meth.

  Meth is evil. Meth is vile. If you do it, you’re an idiot. Period.

  A couple years after we got married, Nif worked part-time at a record store. She started hanging around her co-workers after work while I worked late and went to school. It was three guys in particular, including that little fucker, Scooter, who introduced her to it. That’s how it started.

  We’d been together for three and a half years by then. I was much less naïve about drugs than when we first got together, but still, I had no idea she was fucked up on meth until it was too late. Nif was always a twitchy and scratchy girl, so I didn’t notice an increase in that, but her energy levels were suddenly off the charts. She became hyper sexual, and she worried less about birth control. She started getting mad a lot easier than normal, and she kept doing crazy, impulsive things. Like tattoo a Smurf on her neck. Or spray paint the living room wall of our apartment. Her dad had died a month before, so I figured it had something to do with that. I should’ve read the signs.

  I was at school when I got the call. I was in a writing class at the community college, and my phone had been blowing up with calls. I ignored it because it was my night for people to critique one of my short stories. My teacher’s phone rang, too. When she answered, she looked at me and told me I was needed at the hospital.

  Nif was in a coma. A bad reaction to meth. Her temperature was way high, something like 105, and they were afraid she was going to die. Meth. Fucking meth. I couldn’t believe it, but the moment they said it, it all made sense.

  They wouldn’t let me see her. I kept thinking it was my fault. How could I have been so stupid to not notice my wife, the woman I slept with every single night, was fucked up like that?

  By four AM, her fever broke, and she stabilized. The doctors were afraid she was going to suffer brain damage, but she seemed okay. I had never been so scared. She woke up and was ready to take a visitor.

  I came in, and I grabbed her sweaty hands, and she held onto me with a vice-like grip, her eyes wild with fear.

  “I saw our babies,” she said. “I died, and I went to hell, and our babies were there.” She cried and talked at the same time. “They were boys, Adam. And they were in hell, and it was my fault. They said unborn children go to hell if their parents go to hell, and I was bad.”

  “It was just a dream,” I said. She looked so tiny, like a child herself in the large hospital bed. In the doorway, a nurse stood, shaking her head. I knew what she was thinking. Just another junkie.

  “I’m so ashamed,” she said.

  Her father had left her a ton of money, and I used a sizeable chunk of it to send her to a residential drug rehab here in Tucson.

  I visited her as much as they let me, and she did improve, a little at a time, like that train going up the hill, I think I can, I think I can, but fuck, it wasn’t easy. She yelled a lot, cried a lot, blamed me for getting her fucked up, blamed me for not stopping her.

  What was supposed to be four weeks of detox turned into six. Then twelve. She was released, but she struggled every single day with it.

  She still dreamed of them. The boys, she called them. I have to be good now. I have to get to heaven, so they can go to heaven. It worried me, and I told her shrink the same thing. He didn’t seem nearly as concerned as he should’ve been. “Just be there for her,” he kept saying. But it didn’t seem like it was enough. I felt lost.

  The day of her rehab graduation, she almost seemed back to normal. We got home, and I gave her a present I had been promising for a while. A crazy-ass sable ferret named Hamlet. He would bounce around the house and steal her soda cans, and she would laugh and clap her hands, and everything finally seemed okay.

  But at night, things weren’t okay. She had nightmares. Terrible, waking-up-and-screaming-and-clutching-my-arm-so-I-bled nightmares about “The Boys.” She never named them, because that’d make them even more real.

  Sometimes, after the dreams, she would rock back and forth in our bed, clutching onto her old, stuffed alligator. “They’re calling to me,” she’d say. Then she’d look at me with those beautiful, impossibly-large brown eyes and say, “They call to you, too.”

  Chapter 4

  So when the Mexican kid with the fucked-up hand said, “They’re calling to you,” it freaked me the fuck out. I didn’t know what the kid meant by it, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it as I careened down the road in Scooter’s truck. Grant Road was impossible to drive where the Grinder had rolled, so I took Pima, following the spotlight from the helicopter. The windshield wipers didn’t work, and I had to drive with the rain pounding on the glass. I blasted the heater. My right hand throbbed with pain where I’d connected with Scooter’s face, though it wasn’t busted.

  Scooter ha
d Operation Ivy’s Hectic blaring on the sound system, and I turned it off to listen to the radio as I drove.

  The DJ talked to a breathless kid on his cell, describing what he’d just seen. The Grinder wasn’t on Grant any more. It had cut south across a residential area and took out The Loft movie theater on Speedway, reshaping itself to blast through the entrance and scoop up everybody within. The way they described it, it was much bigger than when I had last seen it, and it had grown legs again. It would go right over cars, peeling roofs off like sardine cans and snagging everyone within. The caller seemed to think it was a monster covered with people, not made of people.

  I pulled up to an intersection, and the stoplights were out. I looked around. It seemed the power was out everywhere. Christ. I turned south, but the road was filled with abandoned and crushed cars. A group of people stood in the middle of the street. Oh, yeah, it came this way, I thought, and I turned and fought my way down a residential street to Speedway Boulevard, right where the Grinder was supposed to be.

  Someone else was on the radio. At first, I thought it was someone who’d been at the scene with the Mexican kid. It wasn’t, but it was similar. A woman had been knocked off the creature, losing her arm in the process. She mumbled something about “the Grinder” and got up and tried to run toward it before she fell over dead.

  The next caller did nothing but scream we had to repent. “It’s the motherfuckin’ rapture,” she cried. “The end of the world.” The DJ hung up on her.

  I continued down Speedway. It was easier to pass through the destruction with the wider road. The Loft movie theater was razed. Power lines and smoking, crushed cars filled the street. The creature had devastated a row of grocery stores and Chinese restaurants. People ran down the street, and cars sped away from the direction I headed.

  I didn’t have to drive much further before I found it.

  I gasped.

  It had more than quadrupled in size. The movie theater and restaurants were what had done it. The Grinder had shaped itself like a spider, with eight segmented legs each made of scores of people. The bottom of the creature rose at least ten feet high, with several legs, arms, and heads dangling in the middle. The damn thing had long surpassed T-Rex size. It lumbered toward the Sheraton hotel near the University of Arizona campus, and its top cleared the fourth level.

  It casually walked up the side of the building. Human appendages shattered windows as it crossed over the hotel in a matter of seconds. It leapt off the building like a cat and crossed the street and trashed a Taco Bell before turning south down Campbell, cutting into the University of Arizona campus.

  Groups of people in red shirts scattered, and gunshots rang out. But bullets did nothing to it. Absolutely nothing.

  I drove over the median and pulled onto the sidewalk just outside of the hotel. From the fifth floor, a bloody, naked woman hung out the window, screaming, reaching toward the Grinder.

  “Holy shit,” I said out loud when I realized where it headed.

  Saturday night. The university hosted a home game tonight. Not just any home game, either. For the first time since I could remember, the U of A football team didn’t suck ass, and they played their arch rivals, Arizona State. I’d never been a huge football fan, but even I had wanted to go to this game. The street vendors had been up for almost two weeks hawking T-shirts in anticipation.

  The game was sold out.

  Arizona Stadium capacity: 57,000.

  The police by now had figured out where it was heading and what it wanted. No longer was it the occasional gunshot. The gunfire transformed into a wall of sound as everyone in the city with a goddamn gun started shooting at it all at once.

  The Grinder tightened into an egg shape, sitting on top of a packed parking lot off the road. It sat there, as if it was thinking about what to do. Two lines of police and random people with guns appeared on either side, one line blocking its approach south toward the stadium, the other across the street near the remains of the smoldering Taco Bell.

  “Stop!” I screamed at the gunmen. Nif. But I knew they had to shoot.

  The entire outer layer of the monster was a pulpy, red mass under the barrage of gunfire. It emboldened those with the guns. They closed in. Smoke rose from the lines of fire, and they marched like Redcoats toward the beast.

  They shot from person to person. I don’t know why. Maybe to put them out of their misery, or maybe they were searching for that one spot that would topple the whole goddamned thing to the ground.

  Only they never hit that spot.

  In the distance, the stadium loomed like a giant face over the university’s stark buildings. It still had power, and the stadium lights blazed. From my vantage, I watched the panic in the stands as they all surged in fear at the monster. Despite the rain, the place was packed.

  Someone had sounded the alarm. Even from a half mile away, I could see turmoil grow within as the confused masses filed out of the stadium.

  A car flew from the center of the Grinder, landing on the front line of police officers, scattering them like birds. At first I wasn’t sure what had happened, but then another car flew out, crashing against the grass. The Grinder was somehow picking up the cars and hurling them. The last of the defenders on that side broke as the egg shape unrolled into a long, low-to-the-ground, centipede-thing the length of four train cars.

  It pushed forward, ignoring the gunfire at its back.

  I couldn’t look away. Watching the Grinder move was like watching one of those Asian contortionist ballets, but with scores of dancers. It would’ve been intoxicating, under other circumstances. The bloody, pulpy exterior of the creature constantly recycled. Every part of it remained in motion as people crawled, rolled, or shifted to reshape and move the beast.

  Even the corpses continued to move. A headless body rose from the back of the centipede shape and crawled onto the back where most of the bullets now hit.

  The monster shambled toward the stadium, raining blood. It took its time. Had it been injured in the gunfire?

  A big-ass yellow bulldozer roared up Speedway, passing by my position in the parking lot and almost clipping Scooter’s truck. It blasted through the median, and concrete exploded through the air. The gunmen stepped away to let it through. They cheered as it rumbled toward the beast.

  The dude driving that thing was either crazy or had balls of titanium, but he full-steamed toward the monster, cutting through the grass and the parking lot. He aimed straight for its tail end. The bulldozer raised the front shovel, and the driver jumped out at the last possible moment.

  The damn monster rearranged itself to let the bulldozer pass. One second it was about to get creamed, and then the back of the centipede split into several directions while the front rolled out of the way. The people on it, momentarily detached, rained down onto the creature to form again. The whole thing happened in a matter of a second.

  A head-to-toe tentacle, ten deep, swept from the body to snatch up the driver of the bulldozer. As the tentacle retracted, the whole thing formed back into the centipede and continued toward the stadium, moving quicker this time.

  The bulldozer continued on its own, raging across the grass until it crashed into a wheelchair ramp and then the side of a brick building. The wall stopped it, but the engine continued to whine. The poor guy driving must have rigged it to just keep going.

  I felt so torn, so helpless. I pushed the truck further onto the road, keeping a safe distance. The monster had to be stopped. Of course it had to be stopped. But I also felt so relieved when it escaped. I just wanted Nif back. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

  Above, a loud A-10 Warthog cruised low over the monster, barely visible in the dark and rain. The nearby Davis Monthan Air Force base was home to a whole shitload of A-10s, powerful military aircraft designed to kill tanks and other armored targets. They were the perfect aircraft to deal with this thing. When Scooter said I’d be blown up by the Air Force, he wasn’t just talking shit. It was a rea
l possibility, and I knew it.

  But this one didn’t shoot. Or drop a bomb. Either it was unarmed or the pilot didn’t want to kill a monster made out of people. He didn’t do shit except circle for a bit, then head south toward base.

  The closer the centipede got to the stadium, the faster it moved. I watched as it disappeared behind some buildings, then it flew through the air and attached itself to the back of the massive scoreboard on the north side of the stadium. It pulled itself over, cascading like a waterfall into the field still filled with tens of thousands of people.

  I didn’t see much of what happened next…but I heard it. The terror at the roller derby was nothing compared to the uproar at the stadium, and I was still a quarter mile away.

  Again, I was so torn. If only the bulldozer hadn’t missed. If only the A-10 had been armed with a bomb.

  If only Cece had minded her own damn business.

  If only… Even now, it hurts to let that fantasy live in my mind, even for just a flash of a moment.

  And when I saw what crawled out of that stadium, I realized for the first time that there would be no happy ending to this. No way. This was more than just a fucked-up monster trashing Tucson.

  This was the end of the world.

  Part 2

  Chapter 5

  The end of the world.

  When I saw that thing emerge over the stadium walls, back into the streets of Tucson, I knew we were fucked.

  I was done. We were done. And by “we” I mean everybody. You. Me. Everybody.

  So, I gave up. I know that’s probably not what you want to hear, but that’s what I did. I gave up. Just because I’m the narrator here doesn’t make me a fucking hero. I was done. All I cared about in that moment was Nif, and she was either dead, or trapped forever. I knew it to be true. So I backed up the truck and aimed it homeward.