The Grinding

by Dinniman, Matt

  “But now, all animals within a certain radius are being pulled in. I’m afraid it’s going to start in on all humans, too, and that radius is going to get bigger and bigger.”

  “How can I save her?” I asked.

  Clementine looked at me for a long a moment. “R and R were right about you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Adam, you can’t save her. At least, I don’t know how. Even if she is alive, even if you manage to get her away, she’s been transformed in such a fashion that she’ll never be the same. She’s no longer your wife.”

  Fear pulled at me. “We don’t know that for sure. I have to try.”

  I realized the animals in the room had calmed somewhat, but the feeling in my chest was stronger. It’s coming this way.

  The news now showed a large, crashed military cargo plane, burning in a field. The headline underneath: Shot Down?

  She sighed. “We’ll need to shield you.”

  It took me a moment to realize she was saying she would help. “Really?”

  She looked around the room. “With the right supplies, and the right clothes, we could probably protect you from being ensnared. If you wear something that completely covers you, the hive’s nerve endings won’t find purchase. Still, I don’t know how to defend you from bombs or from the mental pull it has on you. Or from being squashed like a bug.”

  I felt like an asshole asking, but I asked anyway. “One of the twins told me you sleep with something on your head, to protect you from alien brain waves.”

  She nodded. “A velostat and lead-lined helmet. It doesn’t work in this case. I’ve already tried it.”

  “Then I’ll just have to fight it,” I said. “And avoid getting shot.”

  “And blown up. And burned. And then what happens after you get close to the monster?” Clementine asked. “You going to ask nicely, ‘pretty please would you let my wife go?’”

  The television now featured a blurry, cell phone video of the Grinder as it scuttled down the road toward the airport. The time stamp said it was about twenty minutes after it hit Arizona Stadium. The creature took the form of a massive, sideways-walking crab. The video zoomed in on a group of three obviously-dead bodies, including a boy no older than eight. The bodies fell off the monster, and a tentacle swiftly snatched them back up. The video followed the three corpses as they lay motionless on the top of the beast. After a moment, all three twitched and then climbed off in opposite directions.

  “I know how desperate and stupid this is,” I said.

  “All right, then,” she said. “We gotta get you a dry suit, socks, and something to protect your head.” She grabbed her keys off the counter. “We need to go now.”

  “No,” I said. “Just help me figure out what I need, and I’ll get it alone.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Just because I’m pregnant doesn’t mean I can’t help.”

  “It’s not that,” I said. “Look… Randy, before he died, he made me promise that I’d talk you into leaving the city. He said you wouldn’t go.”

  “Damn straight I’m not leaving,” she said. “If I leave, who is going to take care of my animals?”

  “No one is going to take care of them if they nuke Tucson. They’ll die. You’ll die.”

  “I don’t think they’ll nuke. And if they do, we’ll have warning.”

  I shook my head. “They may have promised they’d warn us, but if I’ve learned anything in the past few hours, it’s that the military is getting their asses handed to them. They’re not going to warn us or wait for us to evacuate, not when that thing can read our minds. It could happen at any moment.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Clementine,” I said. “I don’t know you, but I know Randy and Royce liked you a whole lot. You were very important to them. And I don’t know what sort of deal you had going with this Tim guy, but I do know the twins—my friends—cared about you and that baby enough to sacrifice their lives to come help you. I know your animals are important, but you’re all that baby has. Please get out of town as quickly as you can.”

  “They were dying.”

  “What?”

  “Royce and Randy. Their body couldn’t handle it anymore, and it was slowly shutting down on them. They had to get dialysis three times a week, their liver was shot, and their lungs could no longer handle the workload. They had a year, maybe two to live. That’s why they wanted someone else to raise their baby. Tim—he went to school with them, and they knew he liked me. They knew he would be a good father.”

  Tears streamed down her face.

  It made sense, then. I remembered a conversation I’d had with Randy and Royce about six months ago, not long after Nif’s hospital stay. They’d asked me about my father.

  “When your dad died,” Royce had asked. “Did you remember mostly the good things or the bad things?”

  My dad had been dead for a few years, and I still thought about him all the time. While I had plenty of decent memories, the bad outweighed the good by about a bajillion to one.

  “The bad things,” I answered. “Mostly. But my dad was an asshole.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Royce said.

  “But,” I said, “more than anything, I remember visiting him the night before he died. We sat and talked for hours. We talked more that night than we ever had. I hated seeing him dying like that. And why he died, that fucked me up quite a bit. So, despite everything, I remember the sadness I felt more than anything. He was an asshole, but I miss him all the time. I feel cheated, that he was gone too soon.”

  That was the end of it.

  Clementine seemed to be wavering. I pressed on. “The twins may have been dying, but that doesn’t change what they felt, or how they acted when it came to you. This baby is all they have left in this world. Now that they’re gone, it’s the only mark that they’ve made on the future.”

  That did it. “I…I can go to their parents’ house. It’s in Douglas.”

  A massive relief washed over me. “Their folks are nice people. They’ll keep you safe as long as it takes.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She produced a yellow legal pad and a pen. “But first, let’s get your shit figured out.”

  Chapter 17

  Twenty minutes later, I left her silo with an impossible plan. I carried the duffel bag, now containing the gas mask, a few canister refills, the giant Rambo knife, the glass jar containing the neural transmitter, and a plastic bag filled with syringes and bottles of medicine. She’d offered to let me take the shotgun, but I declined. Without the knife, it was the only weapon she had. She owned a big, white mobile veterinary clinic van, and I left her filling the back with her animal cages. I offered to help, but she pushed me out the door.

  “Goodbye, Clementine,” I said as I left.

  “Once you and your wife get away from the monster, come down to Douglas,” she said, smiling meekly.

  “I’ll meet you there tomorrow afternoon,” I said.

  We stared at each other for a few seconds, each of us pretending like Nif and I really would show up at the twins’ parents’ house the next day. She raised her hand and went back to taking the cages out her back door.

  I thought of my own parents. If they were still around, would Nif and I had gone there? Probably not. Nif had never gotten along with my parents.

  My dad died when I was 19 years old, two months after Nif and I were married. It was a long, painful death, and for weeks the doctors were at a loss as to what it was that was eating him away from the inside.

  “It is the demon,” my mother said. “It has lived within him for a long time, and it now wants to find a new home.”

  It’s funny. My mother was around me my entire life, but I have so few memories of her from my childhood. She rarely spoke. She acted more like my father’s maid than anything else. People used to ask me, only half jokingly, if she was a mail-order bride. I would say no, but the truth was, I had no idea. I never knew how they met. They barely i
nteracted with one another, and it wasn’t until I was older did I realize how abnormal that was.

  Around the time I was 17 years old, it turned out, my mother started the long process of killing my father by poison.

  Scopolamine, it was called, some urban legend date rape drug. She’d put tiny amounts in his food every night, she’d claimed, in order to make him sleep better and so he wouldn’t drink and then beat me or try to steal my money from my new job, which she knew I was saving for college.

  That excuse was bullshit. Yeah, my father was an asshole. He was cruel to me. He made promises he never kept. He never taught me anything, other than how to be bitter and how to fend for myself.

  But he never laid a hand on me. Not once, not even when I deserved it.

  She continued to poison him long after I had moved out. And despite everything I ever thought about my father, I could never, would never, forgive my mother for what she did.

  They had moved to Phoenix after I graduated high school, and I’d remained in Tucson. Her murder trial only lasted three days. Nif and I attended, sitting in the back. I sat there, numb with rage at my mother through the trial, Nif clutching my hand the entire time. Those three days were a blur.

  I’m not even sure why I was so angry. If he’d died another way, like in a car accident, everything would’ve been different. I think I was most angry that she used me as the excuse, and that the defense clung meekly onto that excuse during the trial.

  She was found guilty, and to this day, she rots in an Arizona state prison. The last time I saw her was when they led her out of the courtroom. Even then, her face betrayed no emotion. She didn’t even look at me.

  I rubbed my eyes. It was just after five AM, and dawn would soon break. A thick, misty fog descended on Tucson, like the spirits of all who had died had come together to form one specter that encircled the entire city in its ghostly embrace. I couldn’t see more than twenty feet ahead. I could hear the rumble of airplanes, but I looked for their lights, and I saw nothing.

  I climbed into the Volkswagen, flipped on the lights, and headed out.

  I drove, but here in the industrial section of town, I saw no life. I turned on the radio, but I heard nothing new. The monster still roamed. The evacuees slipped through, and those who didn’t, rioted. Experts were clueless. A seven-year-old ‘prophet’ in Croatia claimed to know what was going on. None of the theories on the radio came close to Clementine’s explanation of the Grinder. Rumors swirled about military infighting. More and more people called for the nuclear destruction of southern Arizona, and they couldn’t understand what was taking so goddamned long.

  I turned the radio from the news, and I found a station playing U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name.” I turned it up, and I sang along.

  Nif hated U2. She hated almost all music, except that narrow group of punk bands she grew up listening to and a few other random genres, like surf and rockabilly. She’d get irritated if I ever turned on the radio at all, since they rarely played anything she liked. I understood and accepted that, and after a while, I found myself listening to music I knew she liked, even when I was alone. I did the same when I dated Samantha.

  Irish faggots, Samantha had called U2 when she saw the CD in my backpack. As crass as Nif was, she was more diplomatic. She’d called them “cabbage-eating pig fuckers,” when I’d mentioned I liked them.

  But now as I drove, I sang—loud—and, for the first time in a very long time, I felt not an ounce of guilt.

  My destination was the scuba shop in the shopping center by my work. It wasn’t far, but abandoned cars littered the road like discarded toys. At one point, I crossed over an area previously traversed by the Grinder. No bodies lined the street, but a 100-meter wide smear of red painted the road where the beast had passed. The dark, cratered houses on either side of the foggy street revealed the absolute destruction wrought by the monster.

  Distant fires continued to roar, registering as a slight glow in the fog. When I rolled down the window, I could smell it, heavy on the air.

  I did see a few people here and there, scuttling away at the sight of my car. One was a C-2, legless and unable to move. The girl was no more than 16, and she pulled herself forward along the road, trailing guts. She raised her hand as I passed.

  Before I left, Clementine gave me a shot in my arm. She said it was vitamins, and it would help somewhat with the urge to go into the Grinder. At the time, I suspected it was a placebo, especially since she’d already admitted she couldn’t stop the urge herself. But it did seem to work a bit. I felt the Grinder, looming in the invisible distance. I felt it as sure as I felt my own hands. But now that I had a plan, the urge to blindly suicide like a bug into a zapper diminished.

  Fifteen minutes later, I pulled into the mostly-empty parking lot by my work. A Safeway, a cluster of fast-food restaurants, and several boutique stores stood in a line. The Safeway was normally open 24 hours, but they had closed the doors only to have them ripped open by mobs earlier in the evening. The foldout doors hung like broken teeth in the grocery’s entranceway. Upturned shopping carts and cans of food littered the lot. The car jumped and bumped over the scattered and discarded food. As I passed, a group of three people burst from the store pushing a shopping cart full of cereal. They disappeared into the mist.

  The scuba shop sat at the end of the line. A red and white diver down flag hung limply on a pole above the shop. I never paid much attention to this place, even though I saw it every single day. I always thought it was strange that a town like Tucson would have so many dive shops, since there was nowhere nearby to scuba dive.

  To my relief, it looked as if the door hadn’t been smashed in. I parked the car in front, and I stuffed my keys and the knife into the loop on my Kevlar vest. I’d never been scuba diving before. I barely knew how to swim. Clementine insisted that a particular type of suit they’d have would be just what I needed, and she told me what to look for.

  “Here we go,” I muttered.

  I picked up a discarded can of beets, and I threw it as hard as I could at the large glass window. The can bounced off and scattered away. I swore, picked up a rock, and tried again. This time the window shattered, crashing louder than I thought it would.

  The glass crunched under my shoes as I climbed inside. I was to grab not a wetsuit, but a dry suit, with a particular type of neck seal. Plus waterproof socks and cleated boots, gloves, and a dive hood. I fumbled through the dark store, wishing I had a flashlight. I could feel time slipping away as the red glow of impending dawn seeped through the fog.

  Finally, I found what I needed, and I put on the black and blue suit over my clothes and the Kevlar. It was hot as fuck, and I imagined I looked like a deranged racecar driver. The seal at the neck felt funny, all tight around my Adam’s apple, like I was sticking my head up through something I shouldn’t. I found an ankle sheath for the knife, and I stuffed the hood and gloves into a hip pocket. The dark store felt unsettling and unwelcoming, like being in an unfamiliar basement with the lights out. I got my ass out of there as soon as I could.

  I doubted this outfit was any better protection than just a couple extra layers of clothes, but it was better than nothing. Clementine had recommended this or a firefighter’s outfit, and we’d both decided this would be better and easier, since I was traveling this way anyway.

  The Grinder loomed in the distance. I couldn’t see it, but I felt it, just a few miles away, getting closer by the moment. I climbed back into the car.

  I realized I did need a flashlight. It wasn’t on my list, and I hadn’t thought to bring one. But I needed one, I knew where one was, and it was right next door.

  Chapter 18

  My work. Big Shot Chicken.

  Yes, after six years, I still worked at the chicken place.

  I pulled around back into my regular spot next to the dumpster. Garbage lay strewn over the lot, and under normal circumstances, I’d be pretty pissed. Jeremy and Nan closed last night, but closers on a Saturday wo
rked till 1 A.M. and by then, the power and phones would’ve been out for hours.

  I’d first gotten hired at Big Shot when I was 17 years old. It seemed like a lifetime ago. I was a different person, that 17-year-old walking into the front door to fill out an application. It was the day after Samantha had dumped me. I’d planned on working there through the end of high school, and maybe through the summer before college. It’s funny, how plans slip through your fingers. You can’t point at one thing and say, this is what happened, this is why things didn’t turn out.

  It’s never that simple.

  I don’t want you to think I’m ashamed of working fast food. I’m not. I’ll never be ashamed of it. It was a real, legitimate job, and I was good at it. You’re supposed to hate jobs like this, but I didn’t. I liked working here. No, it didn’t pay all that great, but I was assistant manager, and I made more money than many people thought. Plus, I had health benefits, and I didn’t stay up at night stressed out over reports and presentations like some of my cubicle-chained friends.

  Still, I avoided telling people my occupation unless they asked. They were ashamed for me, and they were embarrassed that I wasn’t embarrassed. To them, working here while everyone else my age was becoming engineers and lawyers and moving to different cities to get their own offices meant I had failed somewhere along the way. They were embarrassed and ashamed and better than me. I’d get that look, especially from the assholes I went to high school with. The look that said, I thought you were a geek. I thought you went to college.

  What did you do to ruin your life?

  That seemed to be a common theme. Everyone around me kept thinking, hinting, and flat-out saying I was squandering away my life. With Nif. With my job.

  But I was happy. What was wrong with that? Why couldn’t that be enough?

  I didn’t have my keys to the restaurant, but I had a set hidden inside a fake rock by the back entrance. I picked them up, and I jammed them in the door only to find it was already unlocked, which didn’t surprise me. Jeremy often forgot to lock this door on the best of nights.