The Grinding (18 page)

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.

The 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.

These mini Grinders, however, formed very specific
shapes. Unchanging shapes from the looks of it. Their exteriors were more like
a quilt than a Lego sculpture. It didn’t look as if they were made to break
apart and come together again, either. The bodies were fused with no space
between them, formed to make horrific creatures whose only imaginable purpose was
to instill fear before they destroyed.

Before I’d lost the radio, I’d heard the word ‘chimera’—the
mythical creature made from parts of a lion, a goat, and a snake. I think
that’s a close, but not perfect way to describe these new monsters who marched
dumbly down the avenue toward my position. These were more like Frankenstein’s
monster, or golems, made of flesh.

Two of them resembled massive scorpions with
sharpened metal infused into the meat of their tails. Their bodies were a
patchwork of naked human flesh. Towering behind was a 25-foot tall gorilla-like
beast made of coyote. Two giant, octopus-like balls appeared, caked in nothing
but charred flesh, giving them the appearance of a hardened shell.

But mostly I gaped at the middle of the parade, at
the pink crab thing—made out of babies. It stood out more than any of the
others. Its pink, bulbous body, made entirely of infants, skittered sideways as
it moved along. The sight of it caused a fear and revulsion within me that I
hadn’t expected, after all I’d seen. The infants’ heads all stuck outward, like
the crab was covered with hairy pimples. And unlike the other flesh golems,
these infants all appeared alive. And aware. Every single one of them screamed
at the top of their lungs. The sound carried high in the air, louder and louder
as the parade approached.