It’s funny, how different they were. Both of them were geniuses, even back then. Royce was more into physics and astronomy, where Randy loved biology and military history. Both of them were horror buffs, books and film. They had a thing for circus sideshows and movies about freaks. To their mother’s dismay, their room was filled with cool posters and action figures for movies like Freaks, Basket Case, House of Wax, etc.
Randy used to say when they graduated they would join the Marines and be a sniper team. Their reality show even did this whole thing where the TV crew took them to the recruiter’s office. The look on the guy’s face in the office was priceless.
They never did join the Marines.
I asked them once, after we’d been friends awhile, about how they planned on having separate girlfriends with only one dick. Everyone wanted to know, but I was the only one brave, or brash, enough to ask. They were cool, even funny, about it.
“That’ll be the best part,” Royce said.
“We’ll get twice the action,” Randy said. “We both feel it.”
It turned out this other set of conjoined twin girls the same age, just like them, lived in Wyoming. The TV producers set it up so they could meet for the first time, and they had this grand idea that the four of them would fall in love and have foursomes and all that. It turned out they hated each other. Randy called one of them a cunt with all the cameras rolling. That was the end of that.
After high school, the camera crews left them alone, and the twins went to the U of A. They both graduated in three years with science degrees—astrophysics for Royce and biology for Randy. They went to graduate school, and even taught undergrads, but they had to quit over a medical issue. I don’t know all the details, but they had surgery on their chest, and afterwards they got tired easily. So they ended up jobless, and played video games all day. They did have a side business—not quite legal—but it was pretty lucrative.
They collected and sold guns.
They lived five minutes from me, but it took almost a half hour to drive to their house. The streets were packed with cars, some of them abandoned even though the monster hadn’t come this way. I had to travel the side streets and cut across a park filled with homeless people who threw beer cans at me as I passed.
Once I got to Royce and Randy’s place, there was no view of the rest of the city. When I pulled up, the twins were in front of their house, sitting on a bench and watching the sky. Airplanes and helicopters continued to strafe the Grinder, but never dropped any bombs. Based on the position of the aircraft, it looked like it was a good eight miles or more away, still on the south side of town.
“We were expecting you,” Royce said as I got out. They wore sweatpants and a ripped T-shirt with Freddy Krueger on the front. The door to their Jeep was open, and the radio blared RUSH.
Across their lap sat the biggest, weirdest shotgun I’d ever seen. It only had one barrel, but it sported a rotary wheel like one of those old school, Al Capone Tommy guns.
“It’s an AA-12,” Royce said as I walked up. “Gas powered.”
“Good for zombies,” Randy added. “Not so good in this situation. Her name is Velma.”
“Like the hot chick from Scooby-Doo,” Royce said.
“Guys…” I said.
“We heard about Nif,” Randy began. “That Scooter guy was here, and…”
“She’s alive,” I said, interrupting before he could go off on one of his tangents. “She called me.” I told them about the phone call.
“Whoa,” Randy said. “And you’re sure it was her?”
“Of course it was her!” I said. I swallowed. “I want to help her escape.” I swallowed again. “And I need your help to do it.”
“I’ve already figured it out. It’s an illusion,” Royce said.
“Goddamnit, Royce, are you listening to me?”
I’d lost him. He just went on with his crazy theory. “It’s not physically possible for that creature to exist.” He shook his head while Randy looked on in scorn. “If it was that size, it’d collapse under its own weight. Though I gotta admit, the human shield angle is pretty smart. Flesh is especially good at stopping bullets. Plus, there’s the psychological aspect. I imagine it’s fairly difficult to shoot a missile at a creature when you see your grandma sitting on its shoulder through the crosshairs.”
“Royce,” I said, taking deep breaths so I didn’t punch him like I did to Scooter. “It’s not an illusion. Have you looked out there?” I waved toward the city. “Half the fucking town is on fire. I saw it born. Didn’t Scooter tell you how it came to be? He saw it, too. He was closer than I was.”
“Nah,” Royce said. “He was just whining about getting his truck and cell phone stolen.”
Randy laughed. “His nose is the size of a turnip. We didn’t know you had it in you.”
“I don’t give a shit about that little fuck,” I said. “We need…”
“Wait. This is important,” Royce said, interrupting. That was their thing. Besides having two heads, I mean. They interrupted. A lot. They drove half our teachers into early retirement. “That little dude is really pissed about you jacking his truck. He’s got friends with him, too. Those skinhead bastards. The real ones, not the wannabes. We just sold him a Glock.”
I paused. “You sold him a gun when you knew he was looking for me?”
They shrugged. “We didn’t know until after he had it in his hand,” Royce said.
“But don’t worry,” Randy said. “We gave him a clip filled with blanks.”
Royce nodded. “Except there might be one in the chamber. I can’t remember. So try to get him to fire a warning shot first. After that, you can fuck with him.”
Under other circumstances, the thought of someone pissed at me enough to buy a gun would freak me out beyond words. But at the moment, I didn’t give a shit.
“Look. Fuck Scooter. Nif is alive, and the monster is real. I was there. The actual creature, on its own, is small, no bigger than a cat. Then, people touch it, or touch an infected person, and they are instantly attached. It takes over their mind, making them move and rearrange themselves all around it.” I told them about Cece and everyone at the roller derby, and the Mexican kid, and how it got into the stadium.
They were both silent when I finished. They looked deep in thought, and I wondered, not for the first time, if they could secretly share thoughts with one another.
“So,” Royce said. “I was right. It’s not a giant monster.”
“It’s like a wolf wall,” Randy said. “Or a Swedish fall. But a lot bigger. And without the cheerleaders.”
“It hit the football game, remember?” Royce said.
“Oh yeah. I guess it did suck up some cheerleaders. I’m glad we didn’t go. We had a ticket, you know.”
“If I have to sit through one more insipid football game just so you can get a faggy cheerleader hard-on…”
“Hey, it’s your cock getting hard, too.”
Going off on wild tangents. That was another one of their things. “Guys...” I said, growing ever more frustrated. “Please.”
“Aliens,” Randy said, not missing a step.
“I concur,” Royce said. “Softening us up for an invasion. Do we know if this is only happening here?”
“I don’t know,” I said. It was the first I thought of that. Was this happening in other places? If so, that changed a lot of things. First off, it meant the response to this disaster would be pretty slim compared to places with larger populations, like, say, Los Angeles and Phoenix.
Randy turned so I could look into his eyes. “The answer is simple.”
I waited.
“You gotta kill the thing attached to your wife’s cousin.”
“No shit,” I said. “How do I get to it?”
“We don’t know,” Randy said.
“Listen. You’re the smartest guys I know. I need ideas. I need to save Nif.”
“She’s in an armored car, right?” Royce asked. “Interesting. I won
der why it’d do that for her? There must be something important about her.”
“Whatever you decide,” Randy said, “You better do it quick. They’re going to drop a MOAB on that thing sooner rather than later, and that won’t be pretty. It’ll spread soylent green all over the southwest.”
Royce nodded. “We’ll be seeing some fat coyotes in the coming months.”
“Wait,” Randy said, turning to halfway look at his brother. “It attaches, even through clothes? What about shoes?”
I remembered a guy kicking at a person when it first formed. He got stuck, but only after his ankle became lodged. I told them what I saw.
“I don’t think this is magic,” Randy said, “Just because we don’t understand it. There must be something physical happening, probably on a very small scale. The Irukandji jellyfish unleashes these tiny harpoon-like stingers from its tentacles in order to capture prey. They’re so small, they can pierce fabric. I bet this is something similar. Only in this case, it grows fast and immediately connects to your nervous system.”
“And that guy you were talking about,” Royce said. “You said he wanted to run back to the monster. That means it messes with your head, even after you’re free. Tell him about the zombie caterpillar thing.”
Randy nodded. “The Glyptapanteles. It’s a parasitic wasp from Central America. It lays its eggs into the bodies of caterpillars. The eggs hatch and leave the host, but not before they do some serious rewiring to the caterpillar’s brain. The larvae emerge from the caterpillar’s skin and attach to a branch or leaf to pupate. After the larvae leave, the host caterpillar is still alive, but it’s turned into a giant guardian zombie. It just hangs out below the pupating wasps, unmoving, starving to death until a predator comes along and tries to eat the babies. Then it goes berserk, thrashing about like Monobrow Sam at the Metallica concert. Ha. You remember that shit? Anyway, it’s been brainwashed into protecting the baby wasps.”
“Zombies,” Royce said. He patted the gun on their lap. “Maybe we’ll get to use Velma after all.”
“The point is,” Randy said, “it may seem like an indestructible, earth-stomping magical beast, but even the craziest biological entities still have a scientific basis for existing. And that means, there’s gotta be a way to kill it.”
Hope surged in my chest when he said that. But only if it meant saving Nif at the same time. My mind was on a roll with questions. “What about these caterpillars?” I asked. “What happens to them after the wasps hatch and fly away?”
They shrugged. “They die a day or two later.”
Horrified, I looked between the two. “I don’t want Nif to die,” I said. “I don’t want her to be a zombie, either.”
Royce patted my shoulder. “Like we said… It sucks. But there might not be anything you can do. This isn’t the kind of monster that’s usually defeated by a single dude in the movies.”
“I don’t care about defeating the monster. I just want to save my wife.” I exhaled. “Or die trying.”
I didn’t realize it until I said it, but I meant it. I would die to save her. That’s a pretty potent realization, and I know people say shit like that all the time. I can’t live without you, baby. But I knew it was true. I could feel it in the beating of my heart. I had run away from the monster earlier—which was the smart and prudent thing to do, but I had felt so damned guilty and empty about it. Now I realized why I felt that way.
“Okay,” Randy said. “Blind, undying love. We can see that.”
“Let’s figure this out,” Royce said.
Chapter 8
Local radio didn’t work, but satellite radio did, and the twins had it in their Jeep. We sat in their driveway, listening to news reports, trying to come up with a plan. The national media had no idea what the hell was going on. Tucson was the only place this was happening. They had the video shots from the football game to analyze, but nobody on the radio could agree on anything. The outside world had precious little contact with Tucson. Only a few people with satellite phones and internet connections could communicate, and rumors swirled.
Still, we learned a few things. The entire Tucson airport and airfields at Davis Monthan were uprooted and unusable. The Grinder was mostly spread out close to the ground, though it would occasionally rear up like a cobra or tsunami. It was using dead bodies as highly-effective ammunition against helicopters—the Tucson Police chopper was crashed and smoldering on top of a Los Betos somewhere on the south side, and another helicopter had crashed right into the side of “A” Mountain, setting the entire hill on fire.
Despite the video from Arizona Stadium, nobody could get past describing the monster as anything other than a giant, Godzilla-like entity. They debated the origins of the creature.
They also talked of how to stop it. They played clips from an earlier press conference, and the military-monotone voice said flat out that they would never use a nuke as long as “The creature” remained in a populated area. Other options were non-lethal chemical solutions. They promised if they did use big ordnance, they’d warn us first, though I didn’t know how they’d do that.
“They don’t know what to do,” Royce said.
“The radio and cell phone black-out is from them,” Randy said while Royce nodded. They were in their element, talking military tactics. “It’s S.O.P. They know they’re going to have to do something unpopular. They don’t want burning babies shown live on CNN.”
“With all the satellites, they’ll never stop the flow of information,” Royce said.
Randy grimaced. “But they can sure try.”
“They won’t nuke,” Royce said.
“They might if it takes off toward Phoenix,” Randy said. “But they’ll try something smaller first. MOAB maybe.” His eyes widened. “No. Willie Pete.”
“Willie Pete,” Royce repeated. “Of course. I bet they try that first.” He looked at me. “Shit, man. You won’t want to be anywhere near ground zero when they drop that. There’s no defense.”
“What’s that?”
“White phosphorus. It’s some seriously nasty stuff. It’s napalm’s evil little brother. It not only kills you in a hundred different ways, it digs you up after you’re dead and fucks your corpse and then emails your mom to tell her about it. It’s that evil. It combusts at 80-something degrees. It’ll burn a hole right through you like the acid blood in Alien. But it’s worse than that. You get some on you, and it’s over. Even if you douse yourself with water, it doesn’t come off easily because it sticks like wax. Once it dries, it just turns back on, re-igniting off your body temp just to fuck with you. And if you do manage to get it off, just a small amount in your bloodstream from a burn is enough to poison and kill you anyway.”
“Just breathing it fucks you up,” Randy added. He made an explosion noise. “It makes your lungs boil.”
“So, stay away from Willie Pete,” I said.
Royce nodded. “No truer words have been spoken.”
I sighed. “Guys. This isn’t helping.”
“If you want to save your wife,” Randy said, “we’ll need to protect you from the creature. But, we also need to protect you from the military.”
Royce nodded. “Kevlar and a gas mask will help. But we need to know for sure how this monster captures people. My brother’s jellyfish analogy may be correct, or he may be full of shit. Until we know, we can’t keep you safe.”
“We need a biological sample—a body or a body part that was attached so we can look at it under a scope.”
“We don’t have time for this, man,” I said. I slipped out of the Jeep and paced on their driveway. Every minute that passed, the chances of me getting Nif back grew slimmer and slimmer.
“We know somebody,” Randy said. “If anyone has already figured this out, it’s her.”
“We promised her,” Royce said to his brother.
“Who?” I asked. “Promised her what?”
“Clementine,” Randy said.
Royce groaned. “She’ll kick
our ass if we show up at her house. Adam, you met her the other day. She was the girl from the Halloween party.”
“Which girl?” Nif and I and the twins had attended the Halloween party at the university. Nif didn’t have that great of a time because she didn’t know anybody there, so we left early. I had dressed as a dog, and she went as a cheerleader holding a giant jar of peanut butter. Only a few people had gotten the joke, which had pissed off the already-grumpy Nif even more. The twins had worn normal clothes, but Royce decked out in makeup and a wig to make his head look fake. They spent the evening before the party walking around campus freaking people out when Royce would move and talk.
“Clementine was the badger.”
I remembered her. She was drunk on the couch making out with a gladiator. She had a thick, southern accent. “How is she going to help?”
“Let’s go,” Randy said. “We gotta grab some stuff from the house, but we’ll explain on the way.” They shoved the Al Capone shotgun in my hands. The gun was heavy and didn’t feel natural. I’d shot handguns when I was much younger. I’d never held anything like this.
As I held the gun, I worried about something that had been bothering me a lot, especially in the past hour.
I was a pussy, and I knew it.
I used to watch all those war movies, like Hamburger Hill, Platoon, Saving Private Ryan, shit, even the sci-fi ones like Starship Troopers, and it always terrified me. I tried to put myself in that situation. I always wondered how I’d react when the shit started to fly. I knew the answer.
I was afraid my fight or flight instinct was broken. All I had was the flight part.
Once, before we got married, Nif and I were at a Lucky Wishbone waiting at the picnic table outside for our food. This scraggly-looking homeless dude and his wife or girlfriend came up and sat at the table next to us.
“Give us some money,” the guy said. He said it to Nif. “We’re hungry.”
“Get a job, shit bucket,” Nif said.
I could be a real jerk sometimes, but when it came to confrontations with absolute strangers, I preferred avoidance. Nif, on the other hand, liked to light every fuse she came across.
The Grinding Page 5