The Grinding

by Dinniman, Matt

  Small and meek at first glance, her abrasive, aggressive manner caught people by surprise. They backed the fuck down right away.

  But not always.

  The guy went crazy. He jumped up on the bench and ripped off his jacket, revealing a frame so emaciated and frail that a strong sneeze could be fatal. He pounded his chest like a goddamned gorilla, and he let out an incoherent, screaming stream of expletives right in my girlfriend’s direction.

  Nif laughed.

  The guy’s companion tried to get him off the bench. He pulled away, and for a moment, I thought he was going to haul off and punch Nif right in the face.

  I froze.

  I knew I should do something, anything. But I didn’t know what. At the very least, even the most timid of men would put themselves between the crazy and his girl. But I did nothing. I sat there, useless, and I allowed my girlfriend to do all the work.

  “Come on,” the guy’s girlfriend said, finally pulling him off the table. She dragged him away as he continued to scream at Nif. He left his jacket on the table.

  Nif picked it up and taunted him as they left. “You left your coat, you fucking bum! You’re going to freeze to death tonight, you worthless pile of vomit. I’m going to find your corpse in the morning and piss right in your dead fucking face! You hear me?”

  After he was gone, Nif looked and me and laughed. “What an asshole,” she said.

  She never noticed or said anything about my lack of reaction. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  I was a coward, and I knew it. I could pretend, lie to myself all I wanted, but the truth was the truth. There was no fixing it. As much as I wanted to save Nif, as much as I was willing to die in order to save my wife, that nagging little voice in the back of my head wouldn’t go away:

  You don’t have the balls to make the sacrifice. Not when it matters.

  “I still wish it were zombies,” Royce said as they emerged from the house a minute later, holding two black duffel bags. We abandoned Scooter’s truck and went into their Jeep because they had the radio. I sat in the back while they took up the front of the modified cab. They had me continue to hold the gun. Randy did all of the driving from his vantage on the left side, though they both held the wheel. I’m not sure how they managed to drive, but a whole episode of their TV show explained it.

  I eyed the bags. “What’s that?”

  Randy said, “Our zombie survival gear. Loads of cool stuff.”

  Royce continued to grumble. “Damn kaiju. A monster finally attacks, and it’s the one type we’re not prepared for. At least it’s not vampires. I don’t think I’d be able to handle that.”

  “He hates ‘em,” Randy said. “Werewolves, too.”

  “That’s not true. Werewolves are cool.”

  “Since when?”

  The brothers continued to bicker as we pulled out of their neighborhood and turned onto Benson Highway, heading southwest. The smoky night sky had fewer lights than before, but the loud, sonic boom of fighter jets punctuated the air. It seemed the Grinder had finished rampaging around the south side and now zeroed in toward the more affluent, northern side of town.

  I wondered if it had a plan, if it was deliberately attacking specific areas, or if it was like a child at a playground, running around from place to place, just collecting people.

  And, after all this time, I allowed myself to ask the question.

  Why?

  What the hell was going on? How could this happen? Where did it come from? Scooter said he’d seen the thing on the floor. That it looked like a spilled milkshake. But how did it get there? Was it a science experiment gone bad? Was it man-made? Was there a purpose to it, other than being scary as shit? The twins believed it was of alien origin, but I wasn’t so sure. It seemed like an odd, elaborate way to kill us. If they had the power to create such a thing, surely they had the means to drop an alien nuke on us. And why here? Why now?

  The only thing I was certain of was that this wasn’t a mistake of evolution or a nuclear-waste mutation or anything natural. This was a deliberate, I’m-going-to-fuck-your-shit-up creation made by someone or something who really, really wanted us dead.

  It scared me, almost as much as losing Nif. It scared me that I might die and never know the truth.

  Chapter 9

  A few moving cars cluttered the road, though it was mostly abandoned ones that clogged the streets. People had fled, or they were hunkered down in their homes. The radio had nothing new to report, just a rehash of the same crap theories about the monster’s origin and how the military, the police, the government, whoever, were going to respond. Several callers chimed in and said they should nuke it now, before it was too late. “It’s just Tucson.”

  “Yeah, fuck you too,” I muttered as we picked our way.

  Royce changed to a heavy metal station, and Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper” blared. I hadn’t heard that song in years. I used to listen to it to get revved up before a track meet. The twins, a bunch of other guys, and I had road tripped to an Iron Maiden concert our senior year of high school, but that was before I got more into punk.

  I asked about this Clementine woman so they’d turn down the music. It made me even more nervous and jumpy, and I wasn’t sure why.

  “She’s a doctor,” Royce said. “Not a real a doctor, but an animal one. She’s a veterinary parasitologist. She studies parasites in animals. She also has a Master’s in chemistry. We worked with her while we were still attached to the university’s teat.”

  “Why do you think she’s got answers?”

  Royce grinned. “For one thing, she’s batshit crazy. And I’m not just saying that, either. She’s obsessed with cryptozoology. Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, fucking Chupacabre, you know, bullshit like that. She wears some freaky headgear when she sleeps so alien brainwaves can’t get to her. I’m not joking. But she’s also smart. She gets published all the time.”

  Randy coughed. “Well, she used to get published all the time. Then she submitted something about lizard people, and that was the end of that. Now she deworms puppies out of the back of a van.”

  “Great,” I said, not feeling confident at all. “It sounds like she’s just what we need.”

  “Adam,” Randy said. “Trust me on this. If anybody in town has the biology of this thing figured out, it’s her. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s the one who made it.”

  Royce nodded. “I hadn’t thought about that. She already has the evil lair thing going on. Though it doesn’t seem her style to make a man-eating, destroy-the-world monster.”

  “And you think she’ll just be hanging around at her house?”

  “Yes,” they said.

  We traveled west on Broadway, past the Park Place Mall and all the big box stores around it. The Grinder hadn’t crashed through here, but the Red Lobster up ahead was on fire. Across the street, hordes of people looted through the shattered opening of the Best Buy. According to the Jeep’s clock, it was almost midnight. Christ. It’d seemed like hours and hours had passed, but if it was a regular day, Nif and I would just be getting home after stopping at The Nomery for dinner.

  “Ah man,” Royce said, looking out the window as a group of men loaded the back of their truck with several giant flat screen TV boxes.

  “We’re not thieves,” said Randy.

  The traffic jammed the street, and we crossed the median at the intersection and continued west driving on the wrong side of the road.

  I looked nervously at the sky. The lights were getting closer and closer.

  “Where, exactly, are we headed?”

  “You know that weird silo thing near downtown?” Randy said. “We showed it to you a couple months ago when we met up at Club Congress.”

  “Yeah,” I said. The building sat in the warehouse district. They had pointed it out, told me some super-secret stuff went on it there, but they were falling down drunk at the time, and I hadn’t paid much attention. They’d also told me that night that they believed their
father planned on assassinating the president of Argentina.

  “That’s her place.”

  “She lives downtown?” I looked at the circle of helicopters. At the rate we were moving, we’d converge with them right when we got there. “Guys…”

  “We know, we know…” Randy said as he rolled onto the sidewalk to go around a pair of crashed cars. “It’s going to be a bit of a rescue mission, too.”

  “Fuck,” I said, pounding the headrest.

  Randy grunted. “Give us a break. She is the mother of our unborn baby, you know.”

  “What?”

  Royce turned the volume back up, blasting Slayer’s “South of Heaven.”

  As I sat there and tried to wrap my mind around what they’d just said, trying to figure out if their revelation would help or hurt my current dilemma of trying to save Nif, I had the weirdest sense of déjà vu.

  Surely that’s happened to you. Sometimes it’s triggered by a song, or a smell, or the passing of a stranger with a familiar look. It rears up out of nowhere, and it doesn’t seem connected to the triggering event except in the most remote, intangible way.

  In this case, I think it was the song combined with the sudden realization that the twins could have a sex life. They always joked about it, but I never thought it would happen for them. Girls came up to them all the time at the clubs, but they would always chicken out at the last minute.

  Anyway, I thought of her. Not Nif. My first girlfriend.

  Samantha. Crazy, beautiful Samantha.

  She saw me as a project, when we first met my sophomore year. I’d joined the chess club—the Rooks—to fill the after-school time between cross country ending in the fall and track starting in the spring. Back then my family and I had just moved to Tucson, and my dad didn’t have a steady job. I hated coming home after school to find him sitting on the couch, staring into nothing like one of those Easter Island heads, watching TV while my mom worked cleaning hotel rooms. She’d come home dead tired, but would clean the house and cook us dinner every night.

  Samantha was only one of two girls on the whole chess squad, the other being Pandora Miller, and I’m only 80% sure that girl wasn’t a dude.

  Samantha was a whole year older, and everything about her fascinated me. She and I were paired together, and we got along pretty well. She had red hair, which is like kryptonite to nerds like myself, and her pale blue eyes bore a hole in you while she waited for you to make your next move on the chessboard. She had braces with different colored bands every time I saw her, and I used to go out of my way to make her smile so I could see what color she had that day.

  Her favorite band was Slayer.

  Playing chess, somehow she always knew where you were going to move. Four or five moves into a match, and she had you cornered. Once she even beat me in four moves. I never beat her. Nobody ever beat her.

  She acted like that in real life, too: smart, manipulative, driven. That summer between 10th and 11th grades we ended up talking on the phone all the time, and I always had the sense that our conversations were orchestrated dances where I had no real control. This was another chess game to her, only this time I didn’t even bother to move the pieces myself.

  She would pick me up in her red Nissan, and we’d hang out at the mall. I’d always get that look. Why is she hanging out with him? I didn’t have much of a style back then. I hadn’t many friends yet. I wandered from activity to activity, seeing if I could find something that would stick. I was a faceless, personality-less schoolboy drone. I didn’t have tadpoles or a forest to explore that summer, and I had no idea what to do with myself.

  A clean slate, I was. One that Samantha could paint in her ideal image. She didn’t even hide the fact that’s what she was doing to me, and I didn’t care. She decided she liked me in black concert shirts featuring old-school metal bands. And I wore them. I didn’t mind. And once I was introduced to the music, I decided I liked it anyway.

  The only thing I could beat her at was solving Rubik’s Cubes. It drove her crazy. She’d sulk when I pulled a cube out to fiddle with it. I once saw in her room that she had borrowed a book from the library on how to speedcube. She never admitted it though. And I never called her on it. I guessed she never got any better than me. If she had, she would’ve happily demonstrated it.

  We started to date once school started up again, and we started having sex right away. I was a virgin, and after that first time, I told her she was my first. She laughed at me. Of course she knew. I asked her if it was hers, and she said yes, but I didn’t believe her.

  We did it every day. Sometimes before school, almost always after school, and often during lunch in her car. This wasn’t your average, awkward and uncomfortable elbows and knees teenager sex, either. This was wild howler monkey sex, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Sometimes I’d need days to recover, only she didn’t give me days. I’d come home covered in bruises and scrapes from the different ways and positions she always insisted on trying. I told my dad I was on the wrestling team.

  One day, we broke up. Just like that. She went on a vacation over the weekend with her family, and when she got back, she drove me up to the top of Mount Lemmon and told me she didn’t want to see me anymore. When I asked her why, she said she’d gotten bored with me. She said I was like a cool, independent band that stopped being everything that made them worthwhile the moment they got recognition for what they were doing.

  I never understood what she meant. I still don’t understand what she meant.

  Despite my protestations, we broke up, and that was that. She ceased to acknowledge I ever existed, and since I wasn’t on the chess squad anymore, she never had to look at me with those laser eyes. It was okay, though. I didn’t love her, and even though I was upset at first, I got over it.

  Afterwards, though, things changed for me at school. Once you date a hot girl, even an enigma like Samantha, your standing in the school food chain changes. You’ve earned your wings. People see you. They talk to you. They want to be your friend.

  I didn’t take advantage of it. I became ingrained in that strange, pseudo-clique the exists somewhere between the all-out nerds and the long-haired, go-nowhere metal fans who liked to fix cars and everyone joked would end up in trailer parks.

  Samantha went to prom with some guy named Bruce who danced ballet. Bruce is now an openly-homosexual weatherman in New Jersey. Samantha moved to California and, last I heard, was in prison for trafficking cocaine.

  But anyway, the idea that the twins could father a baby surprised me. It made me look at them in a different way. I felt kind of sick to my stomach thinking about it, though I feel bad for admitting that.

  Boom! A missile shot from an unseen aircraft exploded 500 meters in front of us, and, again, to our left in a neighborhood. A red cloud filled the night. The burst was so loud, it slapped me in the chest, and I almost blew a hole in the roof of the Jeep with the shotgun clutched in my hand.

  “AGM-65 is my guess,” Royce said after a moment. “A-10 or F-16.”

  “They ain’t fucking around anymore,” Randy said. “We might be too late.”

  The sound filled my ears with an angry hornet buzz for a few seconds. I still couldn’t see any sign of the Grinder, and I wondered if the bombing was an accident.

  The Jeep screeched to a halt, and I realized very quickly, fuck no, it was no accident. And that bomb was probably dropped in an attempt to save our asses, because out of nowhere—

  It appeared.

  It seeped into the street, a gelatinous parade of the dead, the dying, and the captured. Stucco houses crumbled like dried-up peanut butter cookies as the ten-foot-high amalgam of people, metal, debris, and I-don’t-know-what-else oozed onto the street a couple blocks in front of us.

  And, it had changed.

  Chapter 10

  It had flattened out.

  Shaped like a giant pancake with the legs of a millipede, it ripped across Broadway, moving at about ten miles per hour, which might seem
kind of slow if you’re in a car, but it’s terrifying for something so huge.

  On the ground, thousands of people made up the bottom layer. They hunched forward and backward and sideways like Atlas holding up the earth as they scrambled across the pavement like migrating bugs. On their backs rose three or four layers of people mixed with all sorts of other things…cars, trees, hunks of metal, and other nightmarish figures I couldn’t discern in the darkness. I saw animals, too, all trapped in the beast. Several dogs, a couple horses, and other shapes dotted the skin.

  I looked for an armored car. Nif, where are you… But from our vantage, all we saw was the east side of the thing. How could I ever get around it to check its other sides? I couldn’t even tell how big it was…just huge.

  The majority of the people wore red shirts from the stadium, though many were naked or wore yellow from ASU. Some wore night clothes like they had been ripped from their beds. The top layer was burned to a black, charred crisp, and fires raged from several points on the beast. Most of the people on the bottom appeared alive, though they had broken bones and missing pieces, while everyone on the top layer were dead, at least from our perspective.

  The whole thing looked like a cross section of a giant lasagna, with the ground beef on top.

  Several human tentacles whipped in the air above the monstrosity. As we watched in horror, one tentacle picked up a motorcycle and tossed it like a fastball toward something behind it in the neighborhood.

  As I looked at the beast, I felt a strange tingle in my chest and head. This was new, something I hadn’t yet felt, not my usual horror and worry. It was like fingers poking at me, or like an invisible string went from me to the monstrosity, pulling ever so slightly, urging me, tempting me to go forward, into the Grinder.

  That was insane, of course, to go into the Grinder and be used as a top-level meat shield. I bit my lip as I realized I had my hand on the door handle.