The van was in rough shape. The roof had been peeled off, and the back seat was missing, like it had been lifted out. I guessed that’s what had happened, that the woman’s children or family had been taken.
Maybe she’d felt it, too. Maybe for her, the pull of the Grinder was just too much.
But right then, I didn’t care. I tossed in the duffel bag and shotgun and jumped in through the open driver’s door, relieved to see the van’s key in the ignition. The front airbags had deployed and been pulled away. Attached to the end of the keychain was a small plastic frame holding the image of a fat, happy baby, smiling at the camera, surrounded by teddy bears. I stared at the picture.
I looked out the window for the mom. I didn’t see her anywhere. If she was out there, she was either caught up by the Grinder or blown to kibble by the bombs. I turned the key, and half the lights on the dash remained lit up, but it started. I backed up and turned down the side street toward Royce and Randy.
I turned just in time to see my friends unload their machine gun into a small crowd of drones. Half the crowd hit the ground, but the remainder, all wielding baseball bats and other blunt-force-trauma-inducing weapons, advanced warily on the twins.
Oh fuck.
The twins tossed their machine gun, and they pulled up a single handgun and began to pop off shot after shot into the crowd.
I gunned it. I aimed straight for the center mass of drones.
Too late. Several of them stepped out of the way and onto the sidewalk. They jumped the twins and rained blows down on them with their baseball bats and metal clubs. Out of bullets, out of breath, all they could do was hold up their hands.
I crashed into one straggler who bounced off the hood and crumpled on the street. I ran over a couple more who had been gunned down by the twins. The van lurched and crunched, and an ominous whirring noise emanated from the engine. I grabbed the shotgun and jumped out.
“Stop!” I yelled. Five of them were left. Four men. One woman. They were all around my age except for one of the men, who was in his fifties.
To my surprise, the five did stop, and they looked at me. For the briefest moment, I thought maybe there was a mistake. Like these were normal people, and they thought the twins were part of the monster, on account of how they looked.
“Adam,” the older man said. “Please don’t harm us. All we want is for you to come with us. To come to her. She is waiting. She’s calling to you right now.”
Behind, a jet screamed through the air, but the sound of gunfire had stopped. I felt the shadow of the Grinder behind me, just on the other side of the buildings. I didn’t dare turn around, to take my eyes off of these guys.
“Just go away,” I yelled. Shit, I was scared. But I wasn’t going to back down. Royce and Randy were lying on the ground in a puddle of blood. Both of their arms were broken and bent in impossible angles. Royce’s eyes were closed, but Randy blinked up at me, the pain evident in his eyes.
“Please, Adam. We don’t want you hurt,” the man said. “But we will drag you back if we have to. It’s for your own good. It’s not safe out here.”
“Behind you,” Randy gasped.
I turned to see a second group of thirty or more men coming down the stairs from the parking garage. More came from the street where I had picked up the van. Beyond, the Grinder was gone, which meant it had reformed into its low-to-the ground shape.
The majority of the men coming down the stairs were police officers, or wore the tattered remains of uniforms. Several wielded handguns. They came casually, not fast but not slow, like infantry marching in front of a tank.
I started shooting.
I started with the five in front of me. Three quick blasts, and they all hit the ground. Again, I felt sick, but I didn’t know what else to do.
“Sorry,” I muttered to the older guy as I ran around the van. I opened up the sliding door on the side, and the whole door fell off the track, clattering to the ground, its wires still attached to the van. I fired a few times toward the drone police officers. I dropped the shotgun in the van and half pulled, half threw the twins into the back. Randy cried out in pain as I pulled on their broken arm. I don’t know if it was the adrenaline or what, but they felt way lighter than I expected. I picked up the second duffel bag and raced back to the door just as the drones started to shoot back.
I dove in and wrenched the transmission into drive and floored it, heading west down the road, parallel with the still-burning parking garage. The passenger-side sliding door dragged on the ground as we drove, and the van pulled hard to the right.
Bullets slammed into the side of the van. The window over the other sliding door shattered, and I felt both of the tires on the driver’s side go flat. Suddenly, it drove like a brick in a field of taffy. I turned north on a side street and limped it as far as I could. The engine screamed in protest. Just as we approached 5th street, the engine coughed and died. We coasted to a stop.
Chapter 11
I’d put a half mile between us and the Grinder. I could no longer see where it was. A hundred fires gave the night sky a red hue.
Randy coughed, and it sounded weak and pitiful.
I jumped in the back. Randy and Royce lay where the back seat had been ripped away. The entire floor of the van was soaked in blood and glass. Randy moved as if to reach for me, but he stopped and grimaced in pain. Tears streamed down his cheek.
Then he said it.
“He’s gone.”
He gasped the words wetly. “Oh God, I can’t feel him anymore.” Then he whispered, gurgling, “Royce…no…”
Royce was dead. It took a long time for my brain to wrap around it. Royce. Dead.
My friend.
Gone. Just like that. Gone.
This is my fault. If I hadn’t come to their house…
“Don’t move,” I said. “I’m going to find another car. I’ll take you to a hospital.”
“Adam.” He coughed, and blood came from his mouth. “There’s something I gotta confess. Royce thought we shouldn’t tell you, but I think you need to know. It’s about Nif.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“She’d been coming over a lot lately, while you were at work. You know, just to hang out, smoke some weed. Just innocent stuff. But she was always asking us about being twins. Like if we could feel each other’s minds, weird shit like that. It didn’t make any sense until she told us about her dreams. And about your and Nif’s twins.”
I didn’t say anything, too surprised to react. Other than me and the shrinks, I hadn’t thought Nif had told anybody about her abortion or the nightmares. Royce and Randy? I didn’t even think she liked them.
“Save your strength,” I said. “This isn’t important.”
“No. It is,” Randy said. “She came by that night last March, you know, before it happened. She was really upset.”
She did what? “Wait… She went to your house that night?”
“Yeah. She…she told us she was going to leave you. She was bawling hard. We didn’t know what to do. She loves you, man. She said so, and she meant it. But… I don’t know. She said she just couldn’t take being with you anymore. She didn’t elaborate. We thought she meant she was going to, you know, leave. It wasn’t until a couple days later that we heard about what had happened.”
I sat there stunned. Nif had wanted to leave me? Back in rehab, she had said all sorts of stuff like that, but this was just eight months ago. I had thought all of that was behind us.
Randy continued, grappling with the words. “Anyway, are you sure you want to do this? You can’t save her. You can try, but…you’re going to get yourself killed.”
“But I have to try,” I whispered. “I…she called me. She begged for my help.”
Randy nodded. He coughed, grimacing with pain. More blood came from his mouth.
It was killing me just looking at him, doing nothing. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital,” I said. “I’ll find another car. Don’t worry. You’ll be okay.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It won’t be long. I can feel it. It won’t be long.”
I put my hand on my friend’s chest, and it felt as if I crunched down on a bag of potato chips. My friends were dead and dying. Nif had wanted away from me. All the emotion of the last ten minutes welled up in me and came out like a fire hydrant that had been creamed by a bus.
I sobbed.
Randy closed his eyes, then he coughed. “Find Clementine. Find her, tell her we sent you. She’ll help you, but you gotta help her, too. She won’t want to leave. Make her. Please. Make sure you give her the duffel bag, too. The one you carried, not the other one. Tell her we said goodbye.”
“You can tell her yourself,” I said.
But he couldn’t. He was gone.
I didn’t have the stamina to carry both duffel bags far. I put the bag for Clementine over my shoulder and unzipped the other. It contained several magazines for the now-gone machine gun and another canister for my shotgun, along with a couple more boxes of shells. It also contained a bullet-proof vest. I put it on. It was heavy, like the lead apron for when you get an x-ray. I imagined I looked ridiculous, like one of those guys you see all dressed up at comic book conventions, someone who would never be confused for an actual, real-life commando.
I reloaded my shotgun and dumped the extra shells in the other bag. Inside it, there was a gas mask with replacement filters, and another, smaller bag sealed with a zip tie. There was also a note that read, “Clementine.”
I opened the glove compartment of the van, and I found a pen and a small pad of paper. I wrote a note and left it on the dash.
To whomever finds this note:
The Grinder took the woman who owns this van. I think her baby may have been taken, too. The body in the back are Royce and Randy Dominguez. They were my friends. Please treat them with respect.
I didn’t sign it.
I tried to push the van to the side of the road, but I couldn’t move it. I hoped after all of this was over, someone would find the note and then seek out the twin’s parents and tell them that their sons were dead. I doubted I’d have the chance.
I stepped into the street, bag over my shoulder, shotgun in my hands, and I jogged west, angling toward downtown.
One benefit of this strange, unnatural attraction I now had with the Grinder was that I could sense where it was relative to my position. It had changed direction, rolling east, which was away from where I needed to go. The further away it got, the less I could feel.
I wondered about the Grinder’s foot soldiers. Before, like at the roller derby, one had to touch the beast to remain under its control. This new thing with the drones…this mind control…how did that work? Did they have to be close to it? Or would the control work wherever and whenever?
I put my questions on pause, and concentrated on my route. I would first have to pass where I was earlier…Arizona Stadium. It loomed in the distance, its visage forever burned in my mind now as a giant tombstone. The road was jammed with discarded cars, all packed in so tightly they were useless to me. I remembered the woman who had abandoned her minivan in the street. I wondered how many of the people in these cars had run away, and how many had chased after the monster. I sometimes saw cars moving on the side streets or a pair of candle-lit eyes watching me suspiciously through curtains. But the roads were barren of people.
As I jogged, I thought about everything that had just happened. It still didn’t seem real. Nif had been captured. My best friends were gone. I had killed people. Several people. When I had woken up this morning, my biggest concern was finding the one type of ferret food that Hamlet wouldn’t yak all over the living room floor.
Nothing would be the same after this. No matter what happened. Nothing. And that freaked me out. Even if by some miracle I saved Nif, I knew she’d be destroyed mentally. She was already fragile, like one of those museum paintings that are so close to falling apart, they’re behind glass and you can’t even take a picture of them.
All this pain and sacrifice. It couldn’t be for nothing. I refused to believe it. After all our difficulties, after the drugs, after the long road to rehab.
After that night last March when she tried to kill herself.
Something had to come from it. Something.
Nif was always looking for meaning, for purpose, for something bigger than herself. It’s how she was. For that year after her graduation from rehab, she spent her time looking for answers.
For the most part I’d considered myself agnostic. If there was a God, I figured he probably wasn’t anything like we imagined. Or we were like a forgotten toy buried somewhere in his closet. It wasn’t one of those things that kept me up at night, but when I did think about it, I always remembered the old lady and the tadpoles. The Lord doesn’t care about the beasts of this world, she had said, meaning the animals and bugs and the sort. But I reckoned it applied to us, too. It was the only explanation that made sense to me.
Nif was an atheist when we met. But after her stint in rehab, after all those crazy nightmares pounded on her night after night, she began to question that lack of faith. She believed the dreams to be real. She believed her twins—our twins—burned in hell. It tore her up. She set out to find answers. To find solace. She found neither.
She tried every faith imaginable. She talked to priests and rabbis. She went to the Baptist church down the street from our house. She read up on Scientology. Islam. Buddhism. Hinduism. Other religions I never even heard of. None of it felt right to her.
“I’m doing something wrong,” she told me one night, about a month before it happened. “It shouldn’t be so hard.”
I didn’t know how to respond. So I said nothing.
She continued. “Do you ever get scared, when you’re walking?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know…do you worry that when you take your next step, the ground won’t really be there? Like it had been an illusion all along, and you’ve just been falling and falling and dreaming, and you’re getting closer to the bottom of the pit every moment. And maybe, at the very bottom of the pit, there’s a hungry blender, waiting for you.”
She’d been saying weird shit like this a lot lately. I’d been just doing the smile-and-nod thing, but it was starting to frustrate me, and I didn’t know what to do or say.
“No,” I said. “I’ve never felt that way.”
She looked at me with those impossible brown eyes. “Why not?”
“Because when I take steps, I can usually see where the ground will be.”
“That’s what I want,” she said. “I want to feel that.”
A couple weeks later, I came home from work, and I found her in the bathtub with her wrists slit.
I walked into the house, I put my stuff down, and I could just feel it hanging dense in the air. Something’s wrong. Hamlet emerged from underneath the couch, looking sheepish. Nif rarely let him roam free by himself, otherwise he’d yank all the lamps off the tables and chew on the cable wire for the TV.
People who say they’ve seen ghosts sometimes relate a feeling of cold, negative energy when they walk over a haunted patch. I never believed in any of that stuff, but that’s exactly what I felt when I entered the house.
“Nif?”
The ferret hopped into the living room, ran in a few circles, and then headed down the hallway. He scratched at the door to the bathroom.
I tried to open it, but it was locked.
“Nif?” I called again. She didn’t answer.
I think my subconscious knew what was going on before I did. That oh shit tingly feeling of panic washed over me. It wasn’t unusual for me to come home and find Nif gone. It wasn’t unusual for the bathroom door to be locked because the lock was a pain and often locked itself on your way out. But still, I knew something was…off. I grabbed a butter knife from
the kitchen and unlocked the door.
Nif looked up at me from the bathtub. She moved languidly, naked and bathed in crimson.
“This is taking longer than I thought,” she said.
Hours later, while I sat in the hospital lobby, a woman in a buttoned-up pant suit—a social worker, cop, I didn’t even know—came out to talk to me. She introduced herself, but I didn’t hear her. I was still in shock. I couldn’t stop wondering what I had done wrong.
Nif had told me all about this blender she was about to fall into, and I still hadn’t been able to catch her.
“She’ll be okay,” the woman said. “Physically, at least. But she still isn’t talking. Can you tell us what might have driven her to do this to herself?”
I looked up. “I don’t know,” I said. And I didn’t. I told her about the dreams, about the search for meaning through all the churches. But it still made no sense to me. I was so confused.
Nif spent a month in a mental hospital. I’d visit her whenever I could, and she acted normal, the same as before she’d tried to kill herself. Her new shrink, a bearded guy named Dr. Metcalf, had advised me not to ask her about it, so I didn’t. But I couldn’t stop wondering about what I had done wrong, what I could’ve done.
So, one day I decided the doctor’s advice was bullshit, and I asked her flat out.
“What can I do?” I asked. “Tell me how I can fix it.”
She looked up at me and frowned.
“I’m not your Rubik’s Cube,” she said.
And nothing more.
She came home a few days later, and we picked up where we left off. I didn’t ask her again. She didn’t bring it up. Cece and our other friends would come over, and we’d sit and laugh and play video games, and we’d all ignore the scars on Nif’s wrists.
A month later, she told me she found a church. She’d met a girl in the hospital, and they’d kept contact on the outside. They met for lunch a few times, and things spiraled after that.
The Lambs of Redemption. I thought it sounded more like a metal band than a church. Nif said she went to a service, and something just clicked in her mind, like a light switch being thrown. She asked me to go with her. I didn’t want to, but I wanted to make her happy. So I went.
The Grinding Page 8