The Grinding

by Dinniman, Matt

  Nif is going to be pissed, I thought.

  In that moment, I knew I couldn’t let it go. Let her go. My emotions were like a rollercoaster, moments of utter despair followed by frantic hope. Though all evidence pointed to her certain death, I still thought of her as alive, and it tore at me. The uncertainty had become like a tumor in my chest.

  I had to know for sure.

  Chapter 16

  In the glowing darkness, I could make out the silhouette of the strange, silo-like building at the edge of the warehouse district. I wasn’t sure how to get to it. I turned down a dark street. I didn’t know if this Clementine girl lived in the entire silo, or if it was divided into apartments or what. It seemed like a strange place to live, one way or another.

  This area was deserted. A few cars sat on the side of the road, but I saw no movement or life. As I crested a small hill, I could see I-10 in the distance, and unmoving lights dotted the interstate.

  After a few dead ends and going the wrong way on several one-way streets, I found my way to the entrance of the tall, stucco silo sitting just south of a large, empty warehouse with broken windows. The tall building looked abandoned. It sat ominously behind a tall, wrought iron fence with an open gate. If the building had windows, I couldn’t see them. The metal gate stood amongst the tall, dead weeds. I wondered if the twins had been talking about a different place.

  Then I saw the satellite dish on the side of the building. I stopped the car, and I could hear the distant hum of an engine. A generator. Maybe she was home after all.

  I looked at the car’s clock. Almost 4:30 AM.

  I grabbed the duffel bag and walked through the gate to the entrance. Just as I was about to knock, the door swung open. It swung outwardly, surprising me, and I had to jump back. I stared into the twin barrels of a shotgun.

  The massively-pregnant woman stepped out and pushed the double barrels against my chest.

  “Want to see if your bullet-proof vest can stop a pair of 12-gauge shells?” she asked. She had a thick, southern-fried accent. I remembered that voice from the Halloween party, thinking she should’ve been in a Gone with the Wind getup. Behind her, I could see a dark, curving staircase. Light glowed from the higher level, and the sound of several mewling and growling cats emanated from within.

  “C-Clementine?” I said in surprise. I dropped the duffel bag, raised my hands, and talked fast. “My name is Adam. I’m a friend of Royce and Randy. We met at the Halloween party. You were dressed as a badger. I was a dog. They, the twins…they asked me to come here.”

  “What’s the square root of 5,184? Answer or I’ll blow you clear back to your girly car.”

  Oh crap. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I said. “How the hell am I supposed to do that in my head?”

  “That’s the wrong answer,” she said. “It’s 82.”

  I didn’t say anything. She took another step forward. I took a step back.

  “Say it,” she said.

  “Say what?”

  “Say, ‘the square root of 5,184 is 82!’”

  “Jesus. Take it easy. The square root of 5,184 is 82.”

  “That’s a lie,” she said. “The answer is 72, not 82.”

  I should’ve known someone who would date a guy with two heads would be batshit crazy.

  “I swear to God,” I said. “If you fucking kill me after the night I’ve had, I’ll come back as a ghost and strangle you and your cats to death.”

  She lowered the gun. “You’re not one of them,” she said. “That was a test. They can do phenomenal calculations in their head, even after they’ve been detached. They can’t stand incorrect math problems. They also know ghosts can’t strangle people or cats. Come on in, Adam. I know who you are.”

  My hands shook as I picked up the bag and followed her up the narrow and steep stairs. A poster of a horse hung on the wall as I climbed.

  When I’d last seen her, she was in a full-body badger suit, and I hadn’t noticed she was pregnant. I do remember Nif looking hard at her for a bit, but I just thought it was because she was making out with some dude while the party raged all around her.

  Now that I was thinking about it, what was she doing with another guy, if she was supposedly dating Royce and Randy?

  Clementine wasn’t unattractive, but she wasn’t a swimsuit model either, not that swimsuit models are usually about-to-blow pregnant. She had dirty blonde hair pulled back into a haphazard ponytail and that tan, leathery skin you see a lot on science-y chicks who spend tons of time outdoors. She wore stretch pants and a shirt with three wolves howling at the moon, extended over her pregnant stomach.

  “This is a…bizarre house,” I said absently, looking up. The interior of the building had been converted into a giant home. Two stories of lofts ringed the tall ceiling of the silo. Her A/C bill had to be massive.

  We came to the top of the stairs. She pointed me to an old, tan couch against the wall. I sat down and took in the room before me.

  Royce had called her place an “evil lair.” I could see why.

  The diameter of the room wasn’t that large, but it was filled with animal cages. They stacked three high in most places, and every single one contained an animal. Cats, mostly, but I saw a couple small dogs, a squirrel, and a few guinea pigs. Three Asian-style room dividers stood opposite of where I sat, and heavy, bright lights hung from the rising stairs, shining down on whatever was back there. Another divider covered what looked like an otherwise open bathroom. A small oven and an industrial-sized, double-door refrigerator sat nearby.

  Every animal in every cage was going apeshit. The whole place smelled like the zoo, and it sounded like two zoos at the same time. The animals all scratched, clawed, and chewed at their cages.

  The round, concave interior ceiling was painted with an image I’d seen before…a smiling dude hanging upside down by one leg from a tree. Ah. I had seen it on a tarot card. The Hanged Man.

  I couldn’t see above to the top third floor, but I assumed that’s where she slept. The second floor loft had been converted into a nursery. A Noah’s ark theme was painted onto the walls around the crib, changing table, and recliner. An animal mobile hung from the loft above.

  I felt guilty, seeing that.

  Clementine sat next to me. She leaned the shotgun across the ottoman. “A gift from R and R,” she said of the gun. She waved at the animal cages. “They’re not normally this loud. The cats and the dogs usually run free. Do you want some lemonade? Something harder?”

  I could use a real drink, but I needed my senses about me.

  “No thank you,” I said. I had to raise my voice to be heard over the animals’ din. I paused. “Look, Clementine. I gotta tell you something.”

  “You know,” Clementine said, interrupting. “They never told you about me because I asked them not to. Not just you, I mean. Everyone. We kept our relationship secret. It’s not because I wasn’t important.”

  “I never said you weren’t important.” With everything going on, I hadn’t time to think too much about it.

  “At the Halloween party,” she continued. She cradled her stomach with both hands. “That guy on the couch. The gladiator. Tim. R and R picked him out. He was going to be the baby’s father.”

  “Wait…what?” Over the noise, I wasn’t sure I heard.

  “Tim and I…we’re getting married. Or we were. It was the twins’ idea.”

  I didn’t understand, but I could see it was important to her that I know. She was clearly uncomfortable, and felt like she had to explain herself.

  “They’re dead,” I said. “Royce and Randy. They’re both dead.”

  She took a deep breath and exhaled. “Are they dead, or are they within the creature?”

  “They’re dead. Really dead.”

  “Well,” she said, rearranging herself on the couch. “Well.”

  I lifted the heavy duffel bag, and I placed it on the cushion between us. “They wanted me to bring you this.”

  She unzipped the bag
and peered inside. “They called me, you know. Just before the phones went out. They wanted to come get me. I told them not to. I told them I would take care of myself.” Her lower lip quivered as she talked. Having to shout the words made everything even more awkward than it already was.

  She pulled the gas mask from the bag and set it aside. She retrieved the smaller bag and dropped it heavily on the ottoman. Out of nowhere she produced a huge, Rambo knife and used it to cut the zip tie to unlock the zipper.

  From the small bag, she pulled a single gold brick. She had to use both hands to get it out.

  “Holy shit,” I said. “Is that real?”

  She nodded. “A little more than 27 pounds of solid gold.”

  No wonder the bag was so heavy. “What…how much is that worth?”

  “It depends on today’s value of gold, but I guess it’s around $600,000 or so. Probably more after tonight. R and R have been worried about the US currency collapsing, so they’ve been putting their money into gold and bitcoins. I didn’t know they had this just sitting around.”

  “Damn,” I said. I had no idea they had that sort of money. I mean, I guess selling guns could be profitable, plus they made some serious bank from being on television, but…holy cow. This was more money than I’d ever seen in one place at one time in my life.

  Clementine pulled something else from the bag. A stuffed elephant.

  She placed it down next to the gold bar, and she stared at it for a long time.

  “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me everything.”

  I told her, starting with the roller derby. I told her about the stadium. About going to the twins for help and about how they wanted to come to her for help.

  I told her how they died.

  I continued, talking about getting captured by the military. I even told her about Nif, and that tug at my chest, pulling me toward the Grinder.

  She sat quietly as I talked, staring up to the loft with the crib and clutching onto the stuffed elephant. She squeezed it so hard her knuckles turned white.

  After a moment, she stood.

  “Follow me.” She dropped the stuffed animal and walked behind the divider with the bright lights. I followed.

  Behind the screen and under the fast-food warming lights lay a dead, naked man. An elderly black man, strapped to a table. His chest was peeled open, like in the movies where they’re giving somebody a heart transplant. Oh. And he was headless. His head sat upside down on another table, in a clear, plastic salad bowl. His large, bulging eyes stared at me, as if he were still alive.

  On a third table next to the man lay a small, pissed-off dog, strapped down. It wore a black muzzle, and it growled and snapped as we approached.

  The whole area smelled like Lysol and shit.

  “Well,” I said, taking it in. I looked over my shoulder, memorizing the path toward the exit. “This is pretty fucked up. Yep.”

  “You said you can feel the creature,” Clementine said. She leaned against the table with the severed head, pushing aside a big microscope connected to the computer with cables. “I feel it, too. I was on my way to campus when it happened. I was meeting up with Tim after the game. I got there in time to see that monster crawl out of the stadium.” She nodded toward the man. “This guy, apparently, had been attached to the thing for hardly a couple minutes. He tried to steal my truck. He kept apologizing as I fought with him. He said he had to ‘get back.’ I stabbed him in the chest with my knife.”

  “What’s up with the dog?” I asked.

  “Lieutenant Starbark,” she said. “Tim’s puggle. I had her with me, and she’s normally the most gentle, submissive dog you’ll ever know. But right now, she’s more manic than the others.” She paused. “It’s how I knew Tim was ensnared. She can feel him.”

  She looked at me. “I can feel it, too.” She tapped her chest. “Right here.”

  “I want to get her back,” I said. “I was hoping you could tell me how.”

  She shook her head. “The closer you get to that thing, the stronger that feeling will be. You’ll end up like this dog.”

  “But…have you learned anything? Anything that will help me?”

  She nodded. “Take a look in that microscope.”

  I looked through the dual eyeholes. A bunch of pulsing tributaries filled the round scope like a lightning-filled sky.

  “I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

  She pushed the microscope aside and hit a few keys on the keyboard. Several numbers on a 3D graph popped up. She motioned at the headless corpse on the table. “You were looking at this guy’s skin. Your nervous system takes up a lot of real estate in your body, but this guy here is over-packed with neurons, the wires of the system. When I say over-packed, I mean every square millimeter of space inside of him is filled.”

  “So the twins were right,” I said. “They said it connects to the nervous system and hacks the brain.”

  “That’s exactly what it does,” she said. “It first takes over the existing system, that much is clear, and in a matter of moments, it appears to fill the body with a secondary, parasitic nervous system that’s networked into the central brain.”

  “But, how can it grow so fast? It barely touches someone, and bam, they stop moving.”

  “I don’t know how the nerves grow so fast. The aliens engineered it that way, and with time, I’ll figure it out. As for connecting so fast. That I have figured out.”

  Aliens…? I wasn’t going to go there. I remembered the twins had said she was a bit whacked out, and it had cost her the job at the university.

  A couple clicks of the mouse, and she showed me another chart that looked like complete gobbledygook to me. I could tell she was meant to be a teacher, by the way she reverted into information mode. I wondered if she felt vindicated, even just a little bit, by the appearance of the monster.

  “A square inch of a normal person’s skin has over 1,000 nerve endings. All it takes is a single nerve to come into contact with a signal from the monster’s system, and a person’s network is…hacked, as you call it, at the speed of light. After the connection immobilizes the host, the nerve cells shore up the connection point and the secondary system invades the body, growing alongside the existing nervous system. All this takes place in fraction of a second, allowing the monster to grow exponentially when it encounters a large crowd.”

  She pointed a pen at a section of ripped skin on the upside-down human head. “The connection is so strong, the part that disconnects usually is the area around where the nerves are attached, but not the direct connection point. That’s why all the involuntary disconnects—the C-2s they’re calling them—tend to have a limb or other chunk of their body missing. The connection point can change, too, all in an instant. They may look like they’re walking up the side of the creature like a fly on a wall, but the moment their hands and feet touch, they’re physically attached for that one second.”

  She held up a glass jar of pinkish goo that looked like a bit of brain. “This was inside of him,” she said, pointing at the open chest cavity of the man. “It’s a neural junction. Like a repeater. Some large dinosaurs had them in their pelvises to help move the lower half of their body. If this guy was at the game, and I think he was because he had a U of A shirt on, then this grew inside of his body in less than five minutes. With this, in theory, he could still be controlled even if he was otherwise dead.”

  I told her about seeing headless corpses crawling the outside of the creature. Of how the C-1s brought their dead back to the monster, but ignored the unaffected dead.

  Clementine nodded. “That makes sense. The system needs to be alive or pre-wired for it to be able to take over. But it sounds like the dead still need physical contact with the central parasite to work. At least for now.”

  I looked at the gooey, pink nerve bundle in the jar. That was inside of Nif? Just getting her away wouldn’t be enough, if part of it went with her. If an entire, alien brain lived within her, how could I ever save her?
<
br />   “What about all these assholes who are running around now, fighting for the monster? They’re detached. And what about this?” I pounded on my chest. “How is it calling to me? How does it know who I am?”

  “When the system takes over the body, it starts with the brain. My hypothesis, and it’s only that, is that taking over a brain takes a little bit longer. But once it does, the person who used to be, is gone forever. The new self is immersed into the communal brain. It integrates with your existing brain when it’s outside the hive, but it stops using your original nervous system. The C-2s are only partway there. The C-1s are fully transformed.”

  “Fuck,” I said. “Like the Borg from Star Trek.”

  “Sort of,” she said. “Furthermore, I believe when they’re physically attached, each node has both send-and-receive access. So someone that gets snatched up will learn everything about everybody else on the network. It’s like they’re all sharing one giant brain, and it gets stronger and smarter every time they add someone else. It’s why they can do the fast calculations. It’s why the whole thing will look like it’s moving in one direction and then suddenly veer off in another. It’s because it just picked up someone and learned something new.”

  “Wait. How did you learn about this stuff? Can’t be from this dude on the table. You said you killed him right away.”

  She pointed at the small TV sitting in the room. It was turned off. “Satellite still works. They phone interviewed Dr. Clarence Ingles, a bigwig researcher at UMC before we all lost telephone reception. They took in a wave of the injured after the attack on the stadium, and he noted the calculations, inability to lie about math equations, and ability to psychically receive messages. Since then, others have noted the intense, almost instinctual pull people have toward the creature. At first, only those with close connections to the ensnared feel it.”

  She flipped on the TV. It showed a scene from the stadium from the point of view of the camera on the field. I looked away.