The Grinding

by Dinniman, Matt

  I reached again for Michelle—and missed. She fell backwards against the one part of the picture window that hadn’t yet broken. She looked as if she wore a multi-colored, twitching fur coat. She smashed through the already-cracked window, screaming as she fell to her husband and son below.

  Sickness, pain, fear, it all welled up in me. But I had to keep going. I jumped over a chair and through the open window, landing hard on the roof, knocking over a terracotta pot filled with cactus. I turned to slam shut the window, but a creepy-ass, hairless cat launched itself through the gap, and onto my neck. It hissed and spit and tore at the duct-tape that held my skin into place.

  I pulled the cat off, its claws raking my face and jaw as it chomped my hand. I screamed and threw the twisting and hissing ball of cat against the wall next to the window. Spitting and growling, it recovered and launched itself right back at me before I could even register the fucking, burning, oh-my-God-just-kill-me-now pain I was in.

  Closed-fisted, I punched it in the head. Shit, it actually worked. The thing collapsed onto the overturned cactus, either dead or unconscious.

  I still wasn’t in the clear. The window shattered, and howling animals flooded the rooftop. I turned in time to see the back of Betsy’s head leap off the distant edge of the roof, and I ran toward her and Zora.

  A corrugated steel awning ringed the front of the building. I reached the edge just in time to see the women running across the misty parking lot toward a cluster of ten or so parked cars.

  “Hey,” I called. “Wait for me!”

  I crashed onto the awning, the duffel bag clutched to my chest. A glass jar and several syringes were in the bag, and if any of those broke, I’d be screwed.

  I rolled off the awning into the bushes below, branches cracking and poking me as I fell. I worried about the dry suit. If I pierced the waterproof fabric, I’d have to start all over, and all of this would be for nothing. If cats eat me, all of this will be for nothing, too. I jumped from the bushes just as the door slammed to a Ford Explorer thirty feet away. The engine roared, tires squealed.

  “Wait,” I called again.

  They weren’t waiting.

  I ran. The truck circled around, and for a moment, I thought they were coming back for me. Instead, the passenger window opened, and Zora tossed something at me. It landed on the asphalt, and I scooped it up as the truck screeched out of the lot.

  A set of keys. Zora leaned out the window and pointed to three cars sitting together at the end of the lot before they disappeared into the fog. I rushed toward the cars. Which car was it? I fumbled with the keys—at least twenty of them. Who the hell uses this many keys?

  Behind me, an explosion of glass. I hazarded a look over my shoulder to see the hammer-headed crocodile thing barreling down the parking lot. Just above it, cats and rats poured off the roof and onto the awning.

  Fuck. I scrambled through the keys, and found a double-edged one, please be for a car… The animal beasts were nearly on me. I only had time to try the key of one vehicle.

  The key had no markings, like a copy of the original. I had three choices of cars. Which one would a deaf girl named Zora drive? A deaf girl named Zora who found me attractive.

  My choices were a battered Ford Focus, a red pickup truck, and a 90’s Cadillac Deville. Had I more than a mere second, I might’ve been able to puzzle it out. Instead, I chose the Cadillac because it was the oldest one and most likely to have a key like the one she’d given me.

  I ran up to the car, jamming the key into the door.

  I chose poorly.

  “Shit.” I pulled the key out of the lock and turned toward the truck. That’s when I saw the license plate on the Focus.

  ZORALUV

  I jumped into the bed of the pickup—

  CRACK! The lizard monster smashed into the side of it. The truck flipped sideways with a tremendous crunch as I jumped out the other side. I ducked as the truck crashed over me. It was the bed of the vehicle that saved me, and I crawled where the bed angled up by the cab. As I crawled, dragging the duffel bag with the strap across my chest, I remembered I had a giant knife lashed to my leg. I pulled it free as I emerged into the morning light.

  I expected clawing, biting animals, but none of the small animals had come this far. I could see them, still by the entrance to the Telesync building. It appeared as if they were reforming back into two of the cat monsters, but only half of the animals had returned.

  The lizard jumped on the upturned truck. It didn’t have eyes or a mouth, but its shark-like hammerhead swung at me like an ax, and I jumped back. This close, I still couldn’t tell what manner of small animals this beast was made of. I had expected lizards or something, but that wasn’t it. I swung the knife but missed. I angled away, so I’d have a chance to run for the Ford. I clutched the keys in my left hand.

  The monster jumped, and I dived out of the way, slicing upward with the knife The knife cut through the side of the large beast much more easily than I expected. Bits of it flew away, detaching as they fell.

  Earthworms. That’s what it was made of. They wriggled on the ground. I ran. Toward the Focus, key extended in my left hand. Nearby, the cats were almost fully re-formed.

  I shoved the key in the lock, and yes! I yanked open the door, and jumped in. I cranked the engine just as the worm monster smashed the side of the car, turning it 180 degrees, nearly flipping it. I punched the engine, and I took off across the lot, angling toward the lone exit.

  The cats gave chase, but the car moved faster. After a moment, I was clear.

  Blood poured down the side of my head and from my jaw line. I didn’t even know I had this much blood in me.

  I kept seeing the little boy blow the hole through his father’s face, over and over. How did I miss that he’d been a part of the Grinder? Michelle and Uri should’ve told me. Of course, they hadn’t. They were his parents, and they were protecting him. I wondered how it had happened, and most importantly, how they had gotten him back.

  Parents do strange things to protect their children. Love. It’s the single strongest instinct a human has. It’s what my mom’s defense attorney had said during the closing statements of her trial.

  I sped up, driving parallel with the Grinder, oozing down the street. I needed to get ahead of it, to implement my plan as soon as possible. At every turn, something new would pop up or attack me, like my face being torn to shreds by a psychotic cat. I couldn’t handle anymore. I had to get this finished. I had to save Nif.

  Chapter 22

  I hung a left onto Prince Road and jammed the accelerator. In order for my plan to work, I had to get in front of the Grinder. I drove as quickly as I dared in the fog, looking out for flocks of birds and roaming animal monsters. The road was clear, but random obstacles popped up, like shopping carts and the occasional abandoned or wrecked car.

  A police car zoomed in the opposite direction, right toward me. I swerved out of the way at the last moment. The man driving the car didn’t flinch as he rushed past. I only got a quick glance, but I suspected he was no real cop.

  I turned right, accelerating, running parallel with the monster, whose closest side was now a half mile away. The fog here was less dense, and I could see its outline as it lumbered north, still moving at about ten miles per hour.

  Several animals stalked the sides of the beast, but I moved so quickly, should they attack, they couldn’t catch me. As I drove, I took in the sheer size the Grinder had grown to.

  The whole thing was at least 150 meters wide and a quarter mile long, shaped like a massive millipede. It was too big to support itself on legs, so it moved forward like a parade float, the entire base responsible for holding the rest of it up. Parts of its main bulk towered a hundred meters into the sky. Tentacles waved even higher like snakes in the air.

  “Jesus,” I whispered. Every time I saw it, it was bigger. How could I possibly find Nif in the midst of that?

  My heart quickened the closer I came to it. I didn’t care. I
had to try.

  I overtook the Grinder until I was a good mile and a half ahead of it, then I angled the car toward the point where we would converge.

  I hoped the birds and patrolling animals kept to the sides of the Grinder and didn’t patrol out front. Everything hinged on getting to the main mass without getting stopped.

  I pulled the car over, grabbed the duffel bag, and ran into the small wash on the side of the road. It smelled of sewage, and despite the warmth of my multiple layers of clothing, I shivered.

  Fifteen minutes, maybe less. That’s what I had. I took a deep breath and got to work.

  As I pulled the hood over my head and neck seal, I thought of the days following Nif’s suicide attempt. I had asked her what I could do to fix it, to fix her.

  I’m not your Rubik’s Cube, she had said.

  I thought about that moment a lot. I’d never told her, or anybody, the story of how I’d become obsessed with the Rubik’s Cube. I wondered if she knew the story, if she’d have answered the same way. I regretted not telling her now.

  One evening in the sixth grade, my dad gave me a Rubik’s Cube. He said, “If you can solve this before morning, we’ll buy you that bike you’ve been asking for.” I had stopped asking for a bike about a year earlier. We had moved from West Virginia to a town in Georgia, a half-hour south of Atlanta, and most of the kids my age didn’t have bikes, so I hadn’t thought much about getting one. But the lure of a new bike rekindled my interest, and I attacked that Rubik’s Cube.

  I played with it for hours, twisting and turning, trying to figure it out. The harder I tried, the more frustrated I became.

  I had it made several times except I was just one cube off. I kept getting so close. I’d think I’d have it with one or two more twists, but I would be wrong. I’d turn, and it’d be the same. Two colors would be swapped.

  Somewhere around four AM, I realized what my father had done. I’d spent the previous two hours studying and recording the patterns, writing it down, and I had figured it out. He’d made the cube impossible to solve. He’d popped out a middle top square, flipped it, and put it back in, turning the puzzle into an impossible-to-solve trick.

  I used my Swiss Army knife to pop out the offending piece, I reversed it, and I clicked it back into place. By then, I knew my father had given it to me just to be an asshole. He wasn’t going to buy me a bike. He’d thought it was funny, the idea of me desperately twisting that thing over and over all night.

  I left the completed cube in the kitchen for my father to find. That morning he took one look at the puzzle, grabbed it off the table without a word. He walked out the door. As I watched him leave, I didn’t feel clever or have the sense of triumph I thought I would. I just felt sad.

  Staying up all night took its toll, and I got in trouble at school that day after I passed out in the middle of my math test.

  At home that night, I found a Huffy dirt bike sitting in the driveway. My father said nothing about it. The bike was used, had bald tires, but it was mine, and it ended up being one of my favorite possessions.

  I spent that night and the next teaching myself how to ride. I got pretty good at it, too, and soon, other kids in the neighborhood decided they wanted bikes as well. I spent the summer after the sixth grade racing, exploring, and getting into all sorts of random trouble on the back of that thing.

  Even though the bike was awesome, I found myself more obsessed with the Rubik’s Cube. I never again saw the one my dad had brought home. So I saved up my money and bought one myself.

  I practiced every night. I learned different methods for solving it, including a few of my own. By the time I started the seventh grade, I had a new trick to impress the other kids at school.

  The cube helped me. I felt calm, capable, solving it in just a minute or two. I always had one close to me. There was something comforting in having the ability to turn a jumbled cube into a perfect, six-colored square. No matter how I found it, I could put it back to the way it was supposed to be.

  I discovered something that night after my dad gave me that first cube. There’s no such thing as an impossible puzzle. You can have missing pieces, you can be completely over your head, but there is always an answer. You may have to cheat to get there. You may have to sacrifice more than you’re willing to give, but there is always a way. I believed that with all of my heart.

  I took out the jar containing the pink, brain-like neural junction Clementine had extracted from the corpse, and I poured it into the fanny pack. It slopped in like a glass of milk that had been sitting out for a couple days, and it smelled even worse. I had to hold back my gag reflex. I zipped it closed and tied the whole thing around my waist.

  “This idea sucks,” I’d said, when Clementine suggested it.

  “I know it does,” she said. “But it’s all I have.”

  We’d talked about the zombie caterpillars that had so intrigued Royce and Randy, but Clementine thought the Grinder was more like an ant colony or a hive.

  “From what I’ve seen,” she’d said, “it looks like the people that are physically attached to the main body have no autonomous control. Their brains are shut off, or put into sleep mode. It’s only when they’re detached do they work semi-independently, which means it might be possible to ‘trick’ the mindless workers into thinking that you are one of them. Though I wouldn’t try this with any of the Grinder’s minions who are moving around on their own.”

  “But how can I do that?” I asked. “This thing isn’t stupid. It’s not a bug.”

  “You’re right,” she said, “And it seems very aware of its surroundings. But it’s also gotten so big, with so many pieces, part of it has to work automatically. Just like you breathe, you pump blood, you grow, you fight infection, all without a single thought, this thing most certainly does not have full control over every aspect of its own condition. You’re small enough. It’s possible you could go unnoticed, like a mosquito on a horse’s hide.”

  She told me of another bug, a butterfly called the Mountain Alcon Blue from eastern Europe. It didn’t want to be bothered raising its own pupae. Instead, it tricked entire colonies of ants into raising them for it. It did this by making their little butterfly babies smell like they were just another ant. Not only did the pupae get raised and fed and protected by the ants, but the babies also got first-class treatment because they mimicked the sound of the queen.

  My plan was to make the ant colony think I was an ant, when I was really a butterfly.

  The neural junction tied around my waist and leaking all over my crotch was the key. I’d smell like them, and if they probed, they’d hopefully find the junction, or sense it and leave me alone. I’d have every square inch of my body covered in a non-porous fabric that, in theory, would shield me from getting attached by touch, so the probing neurons of the beast wouldn’t be able to capture me into their network.

  At best, they would ignore me, which would give me free reign to crawl into the Grinder and seek out Nif. Clementine was certain the larger the Grinder became, the more the interior would be like an ant colony with tunnels and throughways, all built and strengthened by bodies and the sinewy tendrils of the Grinder’s fast-growing nerves.

  I wasn’t so sure.

  To me, it seemed as if the people within were stacked like fish at the meat market, no space between one body to the next. If that was the case, then I’d have to crawl about the exterior and hope I’d find a way in.

  And if I didn’t, I’d start digging.

  Once I found Nif, I would implement the second part of the plan—getting her out.

  I pulled the hood over my face and tightened the gas mask. I pulled the straps on the back to make a snug fit. Then I pulled the syringes from the duffel bag and duct taped around my arms and legs. I slung the entire bag over my shoulder. After a moment of second guessing, I decided to switch out my shoes. I took them off, pulled on the waterproof socks, and tied on the dive boots with the cleats. I pulled on the gloves.

  T
he gas mask was surprisingly comfortable, despite the throbbing pain of my multiple head injuries. It wasn’t like the gas mask from the ’40 s with the twin eyeholes, but it featured a single, tinted screen that covered the entirety of my face, giving me a wide view. Duel respirator canisters hung at my neck.

  I feared the tug at my chest would grow as I neared the Grinder. But it didn’t. I still felt it, ever present, but its intensity still hadn’t changed.

  It was in those idle moments, I realized, that I felt it the most. When the adrenaline pumped especially hard, when I fixated on something else, it abated.

  The devil catches you when you’re sleeping, my mother used to say.

  I could hear it before I saw it. Like a constant roll of distant thunder, not quite so loud as you’d think given its size, but loud enough to shake rocks and gravel on the ground. It materialized from the fog like a tidal wave of death, a mountain emerging from behind the curtain.

  “You’re an idiot, you know that, right?” I said out loud. I couldn’t hear my own voice.

  Several large shapes marched in front of the beast. I slipped back down into the wash and peered through the weeds.

  A pair of Hummers led the procession, smashing through cars as they passed. A soldier in full gear manned the mounted machine gun on the right. At first I thought no one stood behind the gun on the left, but then I saw the small head. It barely rose above the sight. Jeez, it was just a young girl, no older than six or seven, clutched onto the mounted weapon.

  As jarring as it was to see her, I barely had time to register the sight before my eyes focused on the menagerie that ambled between the Grinder and the two Hummers.

  Mini Grinders. At least 15 of them lumbered along, all of them bigger than the cats from earlier. They ranged in size from about eight feet tall to a couple huge ones almost as large as the Grinder when it invaded Arizona Stadium.

  Only, they were different. Different even from the cats. It took me a moment to realize in what way. The real Grinder was made of people and animals, its exterior uneven and ever-changing. Even when it had been smaller, each incarnation looked like a hastily put-together Lego sculpture with arms hanging out the side, no true continuity, and a perpetual sense that it could change again at any moment.