It took a long time to drive home, navigating around the disabled and destroyed vehicles that littered the street like crumbs. Even when I got to the part of the city the monster hadn’t yet touched, it was still bad. People running away. Or goddamn running towards the thing. I watched in the rear-view mirror of Scooter’s truck as the monstrosity rampaged through the south side of town, near the airport and the Air Force base. Unable to bear anymore, I moved the mirror and turned off the radio.
It was almost ten o’clock by the time I got home. The rain had stopped, and the clouds dispersed to reveal a hazy sky lit by the half moon and the fires of the burning city.
I didn’t have my house keys, but I got in through the side window. Inside, the first thing I did was open up Hamlet’s cage and set him free. The ferret bounded outside. We lived near the edge of town, and I knew he’d be safer out there than in the house.
I grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, and I sat down on the couch.
I waited to die.
When I was a kid, my dad moved us all over the country following jobs and ridiculous dreams and whatever else struck his fancy. We ended up in West Virginia for a while when I was ten years old. We lived in a rickety-clackity trailer on the property behind a plantation-style house, next to deep, fairy-tale woods that spread for miles and miles. With no other kids nearby to play with, and a whole summer before me, I spent my days exploring.
I was a regular Mowgli for a while, swinging from trees and venturing through endless forest. The only other human I talked to was the old lady who lived in the main house. She fed me pot pies in her living room while she obsessively watched QVC.
Sometimes it would rain for days straight, and I’d run outside in nothing but my underwear and a pair of scuba goggles. I’d stick my face in the raging creek behind the house and look for frogs and box turtles. I’d almost been swept away a hundred times, but it was fun for me, and my parents never noticed I was gone.
After the storms, temporary ponds formed in the deep woods, lasting two or three weeks until they dried up. I would spend hours playing with these ponds…building dams, digging holes to connect them, or just splashing around in them with my Power Rangers.
After one particularly long storm, I found a large rain pond about two miles into the woods. It was filled with blobby frog egg sacs. I visited it every day until the sacs hatched, releasing thousands of teeny-tiny tadpoles into the shrinking pond.
Once I saw the tadpoles swimming around, I started to worry. How long would it take them to grow legs and hop away? I knew if it didn’t rain soon, the pond would dry up, and they would die.
I wanted to move them to the creek. For that, I would need a bucket.
“You can’t do that,” the old lady said when I told her. “You’ll either hurt them trying to get them into the bucket. Or they’ll die in the creek; it moves way too fast for such small creatures. That’s why mama frog laid her eggs in that little pond. It’s best to leave it be and let nature take its course.”
I didn’t want to leave it be. The closest regular water supply was that small stream just beyond our house, almost two miles away from the tadpoles. All the other rain ponds had dried up. Every day I filled two water jugs with water, trekked the long path to the tadpole pond, and refilled it to keep them alive.
I fought a losing battle. Some days, I’d make the trip two or three times, two miles each way. Every day, despite my replenishing of the pond, it got smaller and smaller.
I prayed for rain.
The clouds came, the sky rumbled, but it didn’t rain.
One Saturday, my dad woke me early and told me were going fishing. I had been asking him for a year to take me, so I was excited to go.
We never went fishing that day. We went to my dad’s jobsite and spent the morning collecting hunks of metal. Then we drove fifty miles to a place where my dad argued with a man over how much he’d sell it to him for. Eventually they agreed on a price, and my dad and the man went to a bar together. I was left alone in the truck until it was dark, and when my dad finally came out, he sat in the cab, put the keys in the ignition, and passed out.
It’d been a hot day, but it was a cold night, and I spent it shivering in the back of the truck under a blanket that smelled like oil and dog. I looked up at the dark and cloudy sky and prayed to God that it would rain, even if it meant me getting wet.
Still, it didn’t rain.
I didn’t make it back to the pond until Sunday afternoon. I lugged three water jugs out into the woods. It was so hard to carry them. I had to stop every few hundred feet to rest, and the trip took twice as long as it usually did.
I got there too late.
The tadpoles were dead. The pond had dried up in the heat. It was my fault.
I sat in the leaves, staring at the black, still-muddy hole filled with the dead tadpoles. I could smell the green, mossy water, but it was all gone. It felt as if an elephant stood on my chest, crushing me. I wasn’t even sure why I was so upset. I thought frogs were cool and all, but I didn’t love them. Why did I care so much? I think it was that I felt responsible for them. I had made the choice to take care of them, and even though I’d tried my best, I had failed them.
I fashioned a small cross out of some twigs and stuffed it in the depression made by the pond.
When I got home, the door was locked, and my parents weren’t home.
As I waited, it started to rain. I know, as ridiculous and ironic as that sounds, that’s what happened. It rained.
The old lady saw me outside in the downpour and let me in the big house. She microwaved a pot pie for me, and, as usual, QVC blared on the TV. I sat at her table, soaking wet, stewing with anger. At first I had just been sad. I had prayed for rain, and it came, but it came late.
“I hate God,” I said.
Startled, the old lady looked at me for a long time and then said, “Why is that, hun?”
So I told her. Only, when it came out, I didn’t stop at the frogs. I kept talking. I hated God because of the father he had given me, the father who never kept a promise, but continued to make them. I hated God because I continued to believe everything my dad said. I hated God for giving me a quiet, wallflower of a mother whom I hardly knew, and who hardly knew me. I was half Filipino on her side, and I didn’t know anything about myself or where I came from, and she never cared enough to share.
The old lady laughed, surprising me.
“Your parents love you,” she said. “I can tell. They’re just not good at showing it. You have to learn to take care of yourself, and that’s all there is to it.” She stood and took the now-cold pot pie out of the microwave and plopped it down in front of me.
It was the first time I had ever said anything to anybody about how my parents treated me. Her answer wasn’t earth-shattering or profound. Years later, I’d realize it was just an empty answer an uncomfortable adult gave a child when she didn’t know what to say.
She spent a few minutes watching me eat, then she continued.
“As for your frogs… Goodness me, Adam. The Lord doesn’t care about the beasts of this world. They have no souls. Their purpose here is to keep us alive and humble and happy. These tadpoles you tried to save… It was noble, but God wouldn’t answer such a prayer. God doesn’t see them. He doesn’t care if they live or die. How could he? If he did care, why did he put the puddle there? That would make him unkind, would it not?
“No,” she continued. “He put them there to teach you a lesson. Maybe a cruel lesson, but it’ll serve a purpose sometime in your life. When you care for something, I mean really care for something, it requires sacrifice to do it proper. Now I don’t know what sort of sacrifice you needed to make to save them tadpoles, but it was more than you were willing to give.”
It was a deeper answer than what she had said about my folks. I wasn’t sure I understood it, but it sounded important. It seemed like she wasn’t talking just about the tadpoles, either. Like she had given me a puzzle to put together with pie
ces that didn’t fit.
Either way, her answer made me feel like shit.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that conversation now as I sat on my couch, mourning Nif. I grabbed one of my Rubik’s Cubes off the table, and I worked it without even looking.
I did that often, when I needed to think. I owned over twenty of the cubic puzzles. One was always within reach. Every room of the house, at work, and in the car. Some people chewed on their fingernails. I solved Rubik’s Cubes, though it wasn’t a challenge anymore once I learned how to work it. My keychain even held a mini-cube, a present from Nif. I didn’t like that one much, but I would never tell Nif.
I could solve any 3x3 cube in under a minute. My record was about 15 seconds, though I’d gotten lucky that time.
Outside, my neighbors talked in the street. One of them had a radio, and they listened and cried. Some drove off, screeching into the night while others talked about it being safer here. Above, aircraft and helicopters streaked by.
They were too late.
The Grinder was now a full-fledged, Tokyo-destroying behemoth. It crawled into Arizona Stadium a centipede, a giant monster. It lurched out a mountain-sized destroyer of hope and faith.
We had power at the house, but out my window, the majority of the city looked dark. Fires burned everywhere. I turned on the television—nothing but static. I don’t know how long I sat and stared at the gray snow. My body felt numb, but my mind churned. I knew where I was, but I was so lost, it hurt just to look away from the static and think about anything at all.
A distant explosion rocked the house, knocking a framed and autographed picture of Pee-wee Herman off the wall. The glass shattered when it hit the floor. It was Nif’s, and she prized it. A moment later, the power faltered, but it came back. I stood and picked up the broken frame, and I stared at the inscription.
Jennifer,
I know you are, but what am I?
Pee-wee Herman
(That’s my name! Don’t wear it out!)
I never liked Pee-wee Herman much, but Nif loved him. He had been at some celebrity-filled, fundraising event she attended as a little girl. That’s when she got the picture. She said he was the only one who was nice to her.
I clutched the broken frame. The corner of the picture had bent and torn in the fall. Glass had scattered everywhere. When she sees this, I thought, she’ll be pissed.
That did it. I cried. I cried like a damn baby, bawling and wiping snot on my sleeve.
I felt ashamed. I had abandoned her. I thought of the guy driving the tractor that had failed to bring the monster down. At least he had tried something. I didn’t know who he was, but I bet he had a loved one caught up in the beast.
The phone rang.
Great. It was probably someone I didn’t want to talk to. Maybe Nif’s aunt—Cece’s mom. I let it ring out. A minute later, it rang again. I sighed. She had to be terrified, not knowing what had happened, where her daughter was. She deserved the truth as horrible as it would be to tell her.
I picked up the phone and stared at the number on the caller ID.
The phone clattered to the floor before I realized I had dropped it. It wasn’t Cece’s mom.
It was Nif’s cell.
Chapter 6
Shit. I scrambled, picked it up and answered fast.
“Hello?” I said. “Nif?” Please be there.
Noise. Lots and lots of noise, like the buzzing of a busy factory.
“Nif!” I called again.
“Aaa…Adam?”
I could barely hear her voice over the background noise, but it was her. My heart thrashed in my chest.
“I can’t hear,” she said.
“Nif!” I called again. Had she fallen off the monster? Escaped? She must have. “Where are you? I’ll come get you right now!”
“Adam,” she said, crying and talking rapidly. “I can’t hear you. I don’t know… I need help, but… I’m in a van. A truck. One of those armored bank trucks.”
“You’re free?” I said, pacing back and forth in the room. The glass crunched under my feet. “Tell me where. You need to get as far away from that thing as you can.”
“I saw things.” She said more, but her words were rambling and incoherent. I tried to interrupt, but she just kept talking. “There’s a bunch of us in here. Cece, too. Adam, she’s covered with her.”
Her? “I don’t understand. Tell me where you are!”
“We’re still inside,” she said, sobbing. “In the Grinder.” My joy at hearing her voice changed to panic in an instant.
That word again. This time from Nif’s mouth. “H-how are you calling me?”
Her voice sounded odd, a mixture between panic and something else I couldn’t figure out. “The bigger she gets… They lifted the truck up into her, and we got in, and we pulled Cece in…to keep her safe, I think, but part of Cece hangs outside, so she can connect, but she fills in any way of escape. Adam, I can barely feel her. Those of us who are loose, we touch her, and nothing happens. We’re locked in here. Adam, it’s like she doesn’t want us anymore.”
“Who’s she?” I asked. “Nif, I don’t understand any of what you’re saying.”
“We need help. Please, Adam…”
The power blinked out, and it stayed out. The cordless phone in my hand went dead.
I screamed in frustration.
I ran to our hallway closet and tore it open, looking for that old, corded phone that connected directly to the wall. Please, please be here. I found it after what seemed like hours, and I rushed, plugged it in and dialed.
Nothing happened. I hung up and listened. No dial tone. Either the phone was broken, or the phone line was dead. I cursed and threw it across the room.
I went outside, and a group of my neighbors stood there in the gravel surrounding a boom box. They stared at me, mouths agape. I must’ve been pretty loud in there.
“I need a cell phone,” I said. “Please!”
No one moved. “Please,” I repeated. “My wife is caught up in that thing, but she just called me.”
That got them moving. My neighbor lady with all the dogs pulled out a phone and tossed it to me.
No service.
I jumped on the hood and then the roof of Scooter’s truck, but the reception didn’t change.
“Mine’s out, too, man,” another guy said. “They should still work in a power outage, but the tower must’ve been knocked out or offline. They went out the same time as the electric. So did the radio.”
“Fuck,” I said and jumped down. I handed the woman back her phone and ran back inside.
Think, think, think.
I paced back and forth.
Outside, the whip-crack of more explosions ringed the air, closer this time.
Then, I had an idea. Not a good one, but it was better than nothing.
I opened the back door, and Hamlet bounded back inside. He had caught a bug in the mud of the backyard. I left the door open in case the monster came close, so he could escape. I left the house, jumped into the truck, and headed out.
In the distance, the city spread like a dark blanket, punctuated by hundreds of fires. Above, several lights filled the sky. I couldn’t see the monster, but I watched as red tracer fire from a military aircraft strafed the darkness below.
The twins.
Royce and Randy Dominguez. If anybody could come up with a plan, it’d be them.
Chapter 7
Of all my friends, the twins were the only ones I’d kept from before Nif and I hooked up. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Chuck and Luke and Monobrow Sam anymore, but everything changed once Nif and I got together. They all went off to college, off to lives as engineers and scientists. They thought I was ruining my life by staying behind with her, and they just moved on, and away, from me.
I didn’t try too hard either to keep in touch. Nif’s circle was much more accommodating and friendly than I thought they’d be, at least once I started to look the part.
The tw
ins knew a bit about being ostracized, and they lived in a community that had accepted them for who they were. They remained in Tucson, even after their parents moved away. They remained friends with me, and my new friends, along with all the old guys from high school.
You might not recognize their names, but I bet if you’ve ever watched television, you’ve seen the twins. They had a reality show for a while that followed them around high school until the principal kicked out the camera crews. He’d heard the producers were bribing girls to fake interest in the twins.
I appeared on the show, too, three whole times, but this was all before we became close friends. I didn’t have any speaking parts. Nif showed up a couple times also, scowling in the background.
The sight of Royce and Randy was difficult to get used to. It’s not every day you go to a new school, take your seat, and realize the person sitting in front of you has two goddamned heads.
Siamese twins, some people call them. It’s supposedly an offensive term, but they used it themselves.
In case you don’t know, here’s the info from their Wikipedia page:
Two heads. Two necks. Normal number of everything else on the outside—normal for a single individual, that is. On the inside: two spines that fused together just above the pelvis. Two hearts. Four lungs, but only two were fully functional. Two stomachs. Three kidneys. One reproductive system. Each one controlled a side, and they walked kind of funny, but they ran faster than you might think. One of them (Royce) was a bit more skewed than the other, but in high school they were both good-looking in their own way. They had moved to Tucson as infants from Argentina to get treatment from the University.
I did the whole pretending-not-to-notice thing for a while, even when the TV crew invaded our school the last half of sophomore year. When we wound up together in the rocket club, we became friends. I even started thinking of them as two different people.
The Grinding Page 4