The Grinding (24 page)

“What?”

“That was the name of the band. I told you that
you wouldn’t remember their name. I was wrong. We’ll never forget it, will we?
Prolapsed Vagina. What a stupid fucking name.”

I laughed. I laughed so hard I started to cry.

“Holy shit,” she said, looking around. “We’re at
the Botanical Gardens.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You were taken here for, uh,
safekeeping, I guess.” I still didn’t know how much she knew.

She cocked her head to the side. “I had a dream,
where this little kid asked me where my favorite place here in town was. I told
him about the turtle pond, and he said he was too big to fit in a turtle pond.
So I said this place.”

We sat there for a few more minutes, hugging. We
weren’t out of danger yet. We had to get out of the city. We had precious
little time to get away. But for those few short moments, I didn’t care.

Nif pulled away, looking at me. “She’s gone, isn’t
she? The monster. I can’t feel her anymore.”

I paused. I didn’t know how much to tell her. My
heart ached at what she didn’t know.

In the end, I decided to lie. For the first time
in my life, I lied to Nif.

“Yes,” I said. “She’s gone.”

“Whose car is this?” Nif asked as we rushed out and
into the parking lot. “Where’s Doofus?”

“Doofus isn’t with us anymore,” I said. “You can
thank your friend Scooter for that.”

“What?” she asked. “What’d he do?”

“I’ll tell you everything once we’re safe.”

It was just about 1:30. We had an hour. I headed
east, figuring it’d be the safest. The Grinder hadn’t spent much time on this
side of town, which meant the amount of monsters and ex-drones would be a
minimum, plus it was in the opposite direction of the Grinder’s corpse.

As we drove, Nif stared out the window. She was
soaked in the amniotic fluid from the monster’s womb. She quivered, and she
kept her hand on my knee.

“Adam,” she said after a few minutes of silence.
“I’m pregnant.”

I didn’t say anything, but I feared the sound of
my heart beating out of my chest would be louder than the truck’s engine. I
already knew she was pregnant. The Grinder had told me.

“I suspected for a while now, but I found out for
sure yesterday, before the bout. I took a test.” She turned toward me. “Pretty
crazy, huh?”

“Yeah,” I whispered. “Imagine that.”

“I talked to the boys,” she continued. Her hand
clutched my knee, hurting. “While I was in…in
there,
in my dream. Our first babies came to me. They said they
would forgive me. They said everything would be okay as long as we did it right
this time. They said you would save me. And you did. You saved me.”

I had left the Rambo knife on the ground at the
gardens.

My original plan was to kill Nif with the knife. I
purposely left it behind.

The Grinder was right. I wasn’t going to hurt Nif.
The Grinder knew I would never do it. The monster told me that she was going to
use me, and she was correct. The right thing to do would be to kill Nif. As
horrible as it was, the only sane choice was to kill her.

We stopped at our house at Nif’s insistence. We
rushed inside. Our front door had been kicked in even though I’d left the back
open. Scooter’s friends were long gone. Someone wrote the misspelled “Your
Dead” on our wall with a Sharpie. Nif didn’t ask. She bent down, picked up the
framed picture of Pee-wee Herman and clutched it to her chest. She grabbed a
bag and filled it with her Punk Rock Smurfs and her stuffed alligator. She took
a framed picture of Cece, and after rooting through her drawers for much too
long, she found a picture of her dad and took that as well.

To my surprise, Hamlet was in the house, alive. I
don’t know how or why, but the crazy little rodent had survived. Nif stuffed
him in his travel case, and we headed out.

We drove along the side of the road, cutting
through the heavy, abandoned freeway traffic as we angled our way to Douglas.
Several roadblocks had been set up along the way, but they were all left
unmanned. After the first one, the road opened up, and we took off. We were
forced to take the long way, using Highway 80 through Tombstone and Bisbee. We
passed several people walking on the side of the road, and most of them tried
to flag us down. We didn’t stop.

Despite the warning that whatever was going to
happen would happen at 2:30, nothing did until almost 4:00, just as we pulled
into Royce and Randy’s parent’s driveway.

We parked alongside Clementine’s van, and as we
stepped out of the car, the entire horizon to the northwest turned white. No
noise. Just a flash.

“Don’t look at it,” I said. We crouched down
behind the truck and held onto each other as we closed our eyes. Nif held my
hand over her stomach as we huddled there and wondered about radiation and
fallout.

“Cocksuckers,” Nif said. “I wonder what they’re
going to tell people.”

“They’ll say they didn’t do it,” I said. “They’ll
say the monster nuked itself.”

Nif and I held onto each other and cried. I shook,
terrified of the days to come.

There’s that quote by Nietzsche that people on the
internet love to fling around. It goes something like
If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into you
.

I think of that quote all the time. I see it used
now sometimes when people reference the aftermath of the nuclear explosion over
Tucson. As expected, the government claimed it wasn’t intentional. They claimed
the Grinder had gotten hold of a nuke when it invaded Davis Monthan, and a drone
dropped it from a stolen airplane as the infantry moved in. They also claimed
the crash of Air Force One was the result of a drone flying a fighter jet.

People aren’t stupid. Some believe the bullshit,
of course. There are always those who’ll believe the bullshit, no matter how
high it’s piled. But nobody does anything. Nobody calls them out on it, not
really. Not when they’re as scared as they are. When a major city in the United
States suddenly becomes uninhabitable, when upwards of 300,000 people all die
in one day—with more dying every day from radiation-related ailments,
people sit down, shut up, and they do what they’re told.

When I see that Nietzsche quote now, I don’t think
of the military. I think of what happened to me. The military did what they had
to. The leadership went about it in a cowardly way, killing more people than
the monster did, but in the end, they did what they thought was right, and they
didn’t do it easily.

I am no better. Before all this, I feared I was a
coward, and that I’d freeze up when it mattered the most. It turns out I did
much worse than that. I’ve come to accept it. If it means I get to keep Nif
with me, then I will happily live as a coward.

The abyss gazed into me, and it found nothing to
change.

So I write this now as I wait for my babies to be
born. I won’t tell you where we are, but it’s not in the United States. We move
a lot now. You know how it is, how they’re hunting the few of us who survived
that day.

Take Ruben Villanova, for example. They keep
showing his face and the censored video of the standoff on the news. They shot
him down like a dog, citing national security. Right in front of all those
people at the border crossing into Tijuana, women and little kids, they shot
him. He didn’t do anything wrong. His only crime was being attracted to a girl
on a roller derby team. He was the Mexican kid, by the way. He was the one who
had fallen off the Grinder right at the beginning.

I know the truth. It’s only fair you know it, too.

The only way now for Nif to enter heaven is if the
gates are open when she arrives. Same for me. You know that much. But there’s
more to it than that.

In that moment, as the Grinder died, she whispered
her true plan in my ear.

Nif was pregnant. She was just over two months
along. The babies, of course, are mine. They are twins. Two boys, just like
last time.

From the very beginning, the Grinder sought someone
just like Nif: an already-pregnant human with a partner who would protect her
no matter what. I had to be told the plan. I had to know it, because I also had
to know what would happen if I failed.

Even though the babies are mine, the Grinder has
become part of one of them. I don’t know which one. She isn’t possessing the
baby like a demon would. I don’t have to worry about one of them spontaneously
twisting his head 360 degrees and vomiting pea soup all over the place. The
Grinder is more like a hitchhiker, like I had been when I visited heaven those
three separate times. She won’t control the baby. He won’t ever know she’s
there.

The Grinder won’t get to heaven until my child
dies, hopefully not until he’s an old man and has lived a full life. But to her,
I imagine 80 or 90 years is a short wait, after so long.

But first, heaven still has to be opened. The
grinder in the sky still has to be damaged enough that it breaks, so that the
gristle-encrusted souls will be allowed in. Otherwise, when my child dies, the
Grinder within will once again be rejected, and she’ll have to start all over.

That’s where Nif comes in. In addition to being
the mother of the Grinder reborn on earth, she—like all mothers—is
responsible for protecting our children. By carrying the Grinder within her,
she has been marked and changed in a way no others were.

If Nif died now, she would ascend to heaven like
the others. She would be fed through the process, and she would be rejected and
cast out. But unlike the others, she would find herself in the lake of fire,
ablaze and conscious of the burning. She would be subjected to an eternal
damnation of endless pain, the same damnation that plagued her dreams.

Even after the babies are born, she will keep this
mark about her.

In fact, this taint is so strong that anyone who
comes into contact with Nif in
any way
is marked. It would be as if they had been a part of the Grinder themselves.

In other words, Nif is contagious.

A simple conversation. A handshake. You won’t know
it. You won’t feel it. You can live another fifty years. The stain is there. A
microscopic taint on your soul. Once you die, you are rejected, and those you
love are taken down with you.

I can’t let Nif burn. I won’t let it happen.

If I hadn’t saved her, if I just let her die that
day, it would’ve been over. We few survivors would further damage heaven, but
that would be it. It would be done. The Grinder would be gone. I shouldn’t have
let Nif live. But I did.

Nif and I spend our days delivering flowers to the
elderly. I tell her it’s so we can earn a little money. The six grand from Big
Shot Chicken is almost all gone. The old people love to touch her stomach.

I feel terrible, I do, denying them heaven. How
could I not?

Nif doesn’t know the truth about herself. Thankfully,
her mind has erased much of what happened that night. I don’t know what the
truth would do to her. I don’t intend on finding out.

The Grinder didn’t know how many more tainted
souls it would take to clog and break the gates of heaven. But she figured it’d
be a lot. A whole lifetime of souls.

I have become the Grinder. I introduce Nif to new
people, and they become gristle.

This is how the gristle grinds now. I make it so.
I have to pave the way.

That’s the worst part, not knowing when I’ve
succeeded. So I will keep going, raising my children, trying to make life for
them as normal as I can. I promised Nif, and I promised them.

It’s a promise I intend on keeping. As we live our
lives, I will make sure Nif infects as many people as she can.

But I am afraid. I’m afraid simply introducing her
to people isn’t enough. So, I’ve taken it upon myself to help it along.

No, I’m not killing people. I’m not having Nif
meet people and then following them home and knifing them down, though I have
thought of that. I can’t bring myself to do such a thing.

So instead, I’ve decided to write.

I warned you in the very first paragraph this
wasn’t going to be a one-way exchange. From me, you got the truth. In exchange,
you learned about Nif. Like I said, this is Nif’s story. But it’s your story
now, too.

I should’ve killed Nif, damned her to eternal
pain. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

So strong is the mark upon her soul, just by
reading this, just by learning the truth of what happened that night, and by
learning about Nif, you are marked. Her impression is etched into you. Your
soul has been tainted, whether you believe in souls or not. You picked up this
book innocent, and you put it down as gristle.

I won’t say I’m sorry. I feel terrible. I feel a
guilt like no one could ever know. But I’m not sorry. If I could trade places
with Nif, I would. I was forced to choose between Nif and everybody else in
this world. I was forced to choose between Nif and God.

My choice has been made.

If you’re young, maybe the final soul will break
open heaven long before you get there. And then it’ll be okay. You’ll die, and
you’ll be welcomed, no matter how tainted your soul may be. That’s how it
should be anyway, don’t you think? As much of a monster the Grinder was, she
was right about that. God was an asshole to her. God had rejected the Grinder
simply because she was a little bit like Him. And it’s funny. She was mad at God
for the very same reason. He was a little bit like her.

Believe me, I take no joy in this. Like the
mythical Cyclops who gave up an eye to see the future, only to be tricked into
seeing his own death, I live each moment in dread of the inevitable Grinder we
all face. Like after that first scream I heard in the roller derby when Cece
was attacked by the infant monster, I am filled with fear that I haven’t marked
enough. That Nif will die too soon. The terror fills me. It consumes me. It
won’t go away.

So please, my friend. Forgive me. And pass this
story on. Hand off this book. Tell them it is the truth. Tell them it’s their
story, as much as it is yours. Make copies. For all of our sakes. Pass it on.