The Grinding (13 page)

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?

“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.

“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.”

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 interacted
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.