The Grinding (2 page)

Suddenly, six shoots made of people sprouted from
the thing.

No, not shoots.
Legs.

The legs lifted the mass of sixty or seventy off
the ground, like a giant bug. The heads and necks of the captured at the top of
the legs worked as pivots, audibly cracking as they fell into place. The weight
of the creature—and I was finally seeing it as a single, horrifying
entity—pushed down on those being used as feet, and their legs buckled.
More people crawled down the legs to add support on each side, shoring up where
bones had broken. I watched as one zombiefied person gingerly removed the roller
skates from a girl being used as a foot. The skates clattered to the floor.

The whole creature lumbered forward, stepping
across the arena track and toward the exit. I huddled in front of the monster
like a rabbit, frozen, not believing what I was seeing.

I almost puked right there. More officers rushed
in, knocking me down. Like Officer Beefycakes, they stopped and gasped at the
creature.

That’s when I ran. I stood, and I ran. Even as I fled
from the building and out into the rainy night, I felt empty and guilty for
abandoning her. My overwhelming astonishment at the—whatever the hell
that thing was—was overthrown by the crushing, debilitating shock at
losing Nif so suddenly. Was she in pain? Was she dead?

I wondered what happened to the police officers. I
didn’t hear gunfire, which I was glad for. More officers pulled up, and the
night filled with sirens and the wails of those who’d lost friends, including
me, punctuated by the clatter of the rain against the corrugated awning at the
entrance to the arena. I only ran a few feet out past the barrier, when I was
blocked by a line of parked police cruisers.

I barely had time to turn around, look at the
arena, and think,
What the hell am I
going to…

CRASH!
The large, double-door entrance to the arena exploded in a blast of wood,
metal, glass, and stucco, showering out into the parking lot. Bits of glass and
metal ripped through the air. I covered my eyes and stumbled onto the hood of a
police cruiser.

The creature barreled out of the hole in the arena
door, moving like a cockroach. Screams of despair turned to fear as the thing
passed near me and into the small crowd, snagging people and police officers
before they even knew what was happening. Its six legs bogged down in clumps of
frozen bodies. The front legs collapsed, and the thing fell forward, balling up
like a 25-foot hedgehog, rolling right over cars and out into Grant Road. A
small truck screeched as it careened into the thing, but the monster kept
moving, showering the street with severed limbs and bloody clothes and tattered
roller skates.

The ball hovered in the middle of the dark street
for a few moments, tightened, and spewed dark blood from its top like a whale.
The blood misted in the streetlights. The creature rolled west down Grant Road,
picking up speed, leaving a crushed truck in its wake. The top was ripped off,
the driver gone. A trail of body parts and gore smeared the street in its wake.

To my left, a lone police officer popped off his
gun, to no effect. I ran toward the road, passed through the cactus hedge, and
stopped at the curb. I stepped on something in the dark, and I fell, catching
myself on a bus stop pole. I looked down, and saw a human hand, red and twisted
like a dead spider, smashed into the curb.

The monster was a couple hundred yards away,
careening toward the intersection. It blasted through, rolling over more
vehicles.

The top of the beast hit a low-lying traffic
light, and body parts sprayed into the night. Two of the ejected chunks looked
like full people. They flew and landed hard in the middle of the road.

Before I even knew what I was doing, I ran toward
them.

As I ran, the monster continued to roll down the
road, going faster than I was. It swerved toward a Sonoran hotdog truck, packed
with the Saturday night crowd. People screamed and scattered as it approached,
but it caught at least another dozen victims before it veered back onto the
road and rolled west.

I cried as I raced toward the intersection. With
all the blood, all the body parts on the road, how could anything be alive?

The first person I came upon was a girl, and she
was dead. She lay face down in the road, her head bent at an obscene angle. Her
left leg was missing, and her arms bent backwards and up. But just past her was
a kid I recognized, though I didn’t know his name. He was alive. He was a
Mexican kid, maybe seventeen or eighteen, wearing nothing but jeans soaked
black with blood. He’d been sitting near us in the stands, cheering for a girl
on the Bruisers. The kid sat up in the middle of the road. His right hand was a
bloody stump, and the only finger that remained was his thumb. He gazed west
toward where the monster had gone.

I wanted him to be okay. I
needed
him to be okay. If he could become a part of that thing, be
ripped off, and then be normal again afterwards, I would know Nif still had a
chance.

“Hey,” I said, running up. The rain was pouring
hard now, slapping into the street, causing the blood to run and pool toward
the side of the road. Sirens blared from every direction, and to the west, a
loud crash filled the night. More people came running from across the street,
survivors of the attack on the hotdog truck.

They surrounded the guy in the middle of the road.

“Hey,” I said again, not wanting to touch him.
“Are you okay?” Blood seeped from his hand. He didn’t acknowledge me, and my
heart sank.

A Mexican woman stepped forward and wrapped his
hand in a cloth. She talked softly to him in Spanish. More people stepped
forward to help, or talk about what they’d just seen. Others wailed.

I stood, numb, watching the boy as he gazed
unwavering toward where the beast had gone. A man gave the boy his coat.

The boy tried to stand, but people kept him down.

“I have to get back,” he said, his voice a
whisper. He had a thick Spanish accent, and I wasn’t sure I heard him right.
Around me, the crowd grew quiet. The night air filled with his ragged
breathing, sirens, and the light clapping of the rain.

I pushed forward, my heart racing.
He’s okay
.

“What? What did you say?” I asked.

“I saw them,” he said, still looking west. Muddy
tears or rain ran down his face. He tapped his chest with his bloodied hand. “
Papa
. They wanted me to stay.”

“Don’t worry, man, okay? We’ll get you some help.”

He turned toward me, moving in slow motion. The
entire side of his face was cut up, like it had been dragged along the asphalt.
His left eyelid hung on by a small patch of skin and sat glued to the side of
his head by the blood.

“I know you,” he said. “You’re Adam.”

“Yes,” I said, stepping even closer. He emanated a
strange, oil-like smell. “We see each other at bouts all the time.”

He stared at me, then said something that made my
spine chill.

“Nif is searching for you.”

I froze. “What? What…”

“She’s calling to you. Right now.
They’re
calling you. I hear them here.”
He patted his chest again. He looked west again. “But it’s going away.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. I became aware of how
cold it was, but hope filled me. Nif was alive! Alive!

“Maybe you shouldn’t talk, dude,” another guy said
to the boy. “We’ll get you an ambulance.”

A large crowd had grown around us, and a lady
wearing scrubs underneath her jacket tried to push me aside to get to him, but
I wouldn’t let her.

“How do you hear her? Where is she?” I asked,
though I knew very well where she was.

“The Grinder. She’s in the Grinder.”

The boy cried out in pain, arching his back. He
stood, despite everyone trying to hold him down, and he took off down the
street, headed west, and calling out in Spanish. A few people gave chase but
gave up after he passed the curb.

I didn’t know what to do. Above, a police
helicopter roared by, following the path of destruction. I looked around,
realizing we were in the middle of the intersection, and a traffic jam had
formed around us. A couple people honked, probably those who didn’t yet know
what had happened.

I have to
get to my car.

Around me, the crowd burst into conversation. As I
ran back toward the skate arena parking lot, I heard that word repeated several
times.

The Grinder.

“Fuck!”

I didn’t have my keys or phone. They were in Nif’s
backpack, and that was still attached to Nif. I didn’t feel better, so I said
it again. Then again. I pounded the roof of my El Camino.

People milled around the lot, huddled together and
crying. Several more police cars had arrived, blocking off the exits. A few
cops stood in the destroyed entrance to the skate arena, but as I watched, they
received a call and rushed to their cars, rolling off. Five cop cars remained,
all with pulsing lights, but no cops were left.

She’s calling to you right now.

“Hey man. Where’s Nif?” said a familiar voice.

I looked up and glared. Scooter. One of Nif’s old
friends from when she worked at the record store. He saw my eyes and took a
step back.

“Oh man,” he said. “I didn’t know.” He took a drag
from his cigarette. “That blows, man. Wow.”

I didn’t like Scooter. I didn’t like any of Nif’s
old co-workers from the record store. I don’t know what Scooter’s real name
was, nor did I care. He was a short dude, maybe 5’5, and he had a pair of fuzzy
dice tattooed on the side of his shaved head, which I thought was one of the
stupidest fucking tattoos I’d ever seen. He was a talker, too. A guy who never
shut up. He seemed to be everywhere we were. Concerts. Roller derby. Once we
even saw him at the zoo with his parents. He drove a big-ass Suburban with a
skull and crossbones decal on the back. I looked around, but I didn’t see it in
the parking lot.

“You got your truck here?”

“Yeah.” He dropped his cigarette and pulled out
his keys, which were attached to a thick chain on his pants. He nodded across
the street to the Eegee’s parking lot. Sure enough, his old truck sat there,
double-parked. “You need a ride, man?”

“Yeah,” I said. I took off across the street
toward his truck, and he followed.

He didn’t stop talking.

“Man, this is some of the most fucked-up shit I’ve
ever seen. When that fat Peaches chick had that thing on her face… Oh, sorry,”
he said, remembering that Cece was Nif’s cousin. “Anyway, I thought it was like
a joke. I mean, didn’t you? Remember last week when they set that dude’s ass on
fire? That was a joke. He wasn’t even hurt or nothing. Anyway, I saw the thing
before it happened, you know. I was on the floor waiting for the band to play,
and I saw this slug thing…”

I was barely listening, but I paid more attention
at that.

“…and she walked past me and started poking at
this slug thing. It had come up from a hole in the floor. I thought someone had
spilled a milkshake, so I didn’t pay too much attention at first. Then she ran
past me, waving her arms like a chicken, and it was on her face, and I fucking
laughed, man. I thought it was a joke. Then all that shit started… Man, it’s a
fucking monster, isn’t it? Like that Cloverfield thing, only it’s made out of
goddamned roller derby girls.”

In the distance, an explosion echoed, but I
couldn’t see where it came from.

We ran to his truck, and he fumbled with his keys.
He had to stand on the wheel to get the door open. But he got it open and
climbed in. He looked down at me from the driver’s seat. “So, where we going?”

“We’re following that thing.”

His goofy, this-shit-is-fun smile faded. “Are you
crazy? Why?”

“Why the hell do you think? It has my wife.”

Scooter shook his head. “I’m sorry, man, but I’m
not going anywhere near that thing. If it doesn’t kill us, then the fucking Air
Force will when they start dropping bombs.”

I pulled him out of the truck with my left hand
and smashed him in the nose with my right fist. It was the first time in my
life I had ever punched a person, and I’m pretty sure I did it wrong because my
hand exploded in pain.

He dropped to the ground, his head banging into
the open threshold of his truck. I put my foot on his chest, grabbed his key
chain, and pulled until the belt loop on his Dickies snapped.

“Sorry, Scooter,” I said as I climbed into the truck
and slammed the door.

Scooter stood, holding his face as blood poured.
Behind him, workers from the Eegee’s stood wide-eyed. I felt bad, but then I
remembered why I disliked Scooter in the first place, and my guilt eased. He
screamed and pounded on the window as I threw the truck into reverse. He pulled
out his cell phone, I presumed to call 911, but instead, he threw it at the
windshield. And missed.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” I said as I tossed the
truck into drive and drove away.

I had to get to the monster. The Grinder, the kid
had called it. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I reached it, but I
had to find Nif. If she was still alive, stuck somewhere in the middle of that
thing, I had to find a way to help her.

She’s calling to you right now.

THEY’RE calling to you.

We’d been together for about a year and a half
when she dropped a nuclear bomb in my lap.

“Adam,” she said one night, out of nowhere. “I had
an abortion.”

We were downtown, eating at The Nomery, a favorite
haunt of ours because it was good, cheap, and open 24 hours. We’d become
regulars, meeting up with our friends, sometimes at 3 in the morning. Tonight,
we were the only customers in the entire place, but she said it right as the
waiter poured more coffee into her cup. The poor guy looked at me, eyes wide,
and fled.

I just stared at her, my brain not processing her
words. She might as well have said, “I’ve spontaneously grown a penis.” My
brain rebooted. “What? When?”

“More than a year ago,” she said. “I got pregnant
after that first time.”

I stammered. “I…what?” I always wore a condom, and
she was on the pill, too. She insisted on the double protection. She was
paranoid about getting pregnant.

At that, she burst into tears, and words just
poured out of her. “I didn’t want to fuck up your life. I was always jealous of
you. I wanted to be like you. You were going to college. You were going to be
somebody. But I knew you weren’t some asshole, that you would never leave me if
you knew I had a baby coming. So I got rid of it. Rid of them…” She sniffled
again. “They were twins.”

I started to respond, but she kept talking, “But
you didn’t leave, and I fucked up your life anyway.”

I went round to sit next to her in the booth and
put my arms around her.

“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,”
I said.

She sobbed and grabbed my jacket, burying her
face.

“I love you,” I whispered into her ear. I meant
it, too. “I don’t care if you had an abortion. I wish you had told me earlier,
but it doesn’t change anything. You haven’t fucked up my life. I didn’t know
what I wanted or who I was until I met you. You helped me find myself.”

She wrapped her arms around my waist and held onto
me so tight, it hurt. She cried and cried.

“Remember rule number two,” I said.

She cried for a long time, and I didn’t say
anything else.

She finally looked up at me, her face streaked
with mascara. “You either marry me or dump me. That’s the only way you’re going
to get me to let go of you right now.”

So I married her.

We were both 19. We got into my car, drove the 450
miles to Las Vegas, and we got married by a black Elvis impersonator at the
first chapel we found. We went to some government place to make it official, then
we drove home and announced it to all of our friends.

Sometimes I think about how things would’ve been
if we’d kept the babies. Twins. Holy cow. We weren’t ready. Hell, we weren’t
ready to get married, either. But I think we would’ve managed okay.

Nif thought about the babies a lot, too. It ate
her up inside.

By the time she was 20, several of our friends
were having kids. I could see it in Nif’s eyes every time she looked at one of
her pregnant friends. She was thinking about what could’ve been.

We both wanted kids, but we both wanted to wait
until we were older and made more money. And were less stupid.

Like with the drugs.

I smoked weed, but not too often. I tried heroin
once. Acid three times. Cocaine a number of times. I never saw the big deal, then
again, I never got addicted.

Nif smoked a whole lot more than I did. And while
I think weed should be legalized and all that, I don’t think anyone would
disagree that you shouldn’t be doing that stuff around a baby.

So we decided to wait. We both had a lot of
growing up to do, and we didn’t want to risk screwing up a kid. As it turned
out, Nif had more growing up to do than I thought.

Meth.

Fucking meth.

Meth is evil. Meth is vile. If you do it, you’re
an idiot. Period.

A couple years after we got married, Nif worked
part-time at a record store. She started hanging around her co-workers after
work while I worked late and went to school. It was three guys in particular,
including that little fucker, Scooter, who introduced her to it. That’s how it
started.

We’d been together for three and a half years by
then. I was much less naïve about drugs than when we first got together, but
still, I had no idea she was fucked up on meth until it was too late. Nif was
always a twitchy and scratchy girl, so I didn’t notice an increase in that, but
her energy levels were suddenly off the charts. She became hyper sexual, and
she worried less about birth control. She started getting mad a lot easier than
normal, and she kept doing crazy, impulsive things. Like tattoo a Smurf on her
neck. Or spray paint the living room wall of our apartment. Her dad had died a
month before, so I figured it had something to do with that. I should’ve read
the signs.

I was at school when I got the call. I was in a
writing class at the community college, and my phone had been blowing up with
calls. I ignored it because it was my night for people to critique one of my
short stories. My teacher’s phone rang, too. When she answered, she looked at
me and told me I was needed at the hospital.

Nif was in a coma. A bad reaction to meth. Her
temperature was way high, something like 105, and they were afraid she was
going to die. Meth. Fucking meth. I couldn’t believe it, but the moment they
said it, it all made sense.

They wouldn’t let me see her. I kept thinking it
was my fault. How could I have been so stupid to not notice my wife, the woman
I slept with every single night, was fucked up like that?

By four AM, her fever broke, and she stabilized.
The doctors were afraid she was going to suffer brain damage, but she seemed
okay. I had never been so scared. She woke up and was ready to take a visitor.

I came in, and I grabbed her sweaty hands, and she
held onto me with a vice-like grip, her eyes wild with fear.

“I saw our babies,” she said. “I died, and I went
to hell, and our babies were there.” She cried and talked at the same time.
“They were boys, Adam. And they were in hell, and it was my fault. They said
unborn children go to hell if their parents go to hell, and I was bad.”

“It was just a dream,” I said. She looked so tiny,
like a child herself in the large hospital bed. In the doorway, a nurse stood,
shaking her head. I knew what she was thinking. Just another junkie.

“I’m so ashamed,” she said.

Her father had left her a ton of money, and I used
a sizeable chunk of it to send her to a residential drug rehab here in Tucson.

I visited her as much as they let me, and she did
improve, a little at a time, like that train going up the hill, I think I can,
I think I can, but fuck, it wasn’t easy. She yelled a lot, cried a lot, blamed
me for getting her fucked up, blamed me for not stopping her.

What was supposed to be four weeks of detox turned
into six. Then twelve. She was released, but she struggled every single day
with it.

She still dreamed of them. The boys, she called
them. I have to be good now. I have to get to heaven, so they can go to heaven.
It worried me, and I told her shrink the same thing. He didn’t seem nearly as
concerned as he should’ve been. “Just be there for her,” he kept saying. But it
didn’t seem like it was enough. I felt lost.

The day of her rehab graduation, she almost seemed
back to normal. We got home, and I gave her a present I had been promising for
a while. A crazy-ass sable ferret named Hamlet. He would bounce around the
house and steal her soda cans, and she would laugh and clap her hands, and everything
finally seemed okay.

But at night, things weren’t okay. She had
nightmares. Terrible, waking-up-and-screaming-and-clutching-my-arm-so-I-bled
nightmares about “The Boys.” She never named them, because that’d make them
even more real.

Sometimes, after the dreams, she would rock back and
forth in our bed, clutching onto her old, stuffed alligator. “They’re calling
to me,” she’d say. Then she’d look at me with those beautiful, impossibly-large
brown eyes and say, “They call to you, too.”