The Grinding (4 page)

Shit
. I
scrambled, picked it up and answered fast.

“Hello?” I said. “Nif?”
Please be there.

Noise. Lots and lots of noise, like the buzzing of
a busy factory.

“Nif!” I called again.

“Aaa…Adam?”

I could barely hear her voice over the background
noise, but it was her. My heart thrashed in my chest.

“I can’t hear,” she said.

“Nif!” I called again. Had she fallen off the
monster? Escaped? She must have. “Where are you? I’ll come get you right now!”

“Adam,” she said, crying and talking rapidly. “I
can’t hear you. I don’t know… I need help, but… I’m in a van. A truck. One of
those armored bank trucks.”

“You’re free?” I said, pacing back and forth in
the room. The glass crunched under my feet. “Tell me where. You need to get as
far away from that thing as you can.”

“I saw things.” She said more, but her words were rambling
and incoherent. I tried to interrupt, but she just kept talking. “There’s a
bunch of us in here. Cece, too. Adam, she’s covered with her.”

Her?
“I
don’t understand. Tell me where you are!”

“We’re still inside,” she said, sobbing. “In the
Grinder.” My joy at hearing her voice changed to panic in an instant.

That word again. This time from Nif’s mouth. “H-how
are you calling me?”

Her voice sounded odd, a mixture between panic and
something else I couldn’t figure out. “The bigger she gets… They lifted the
truck up into her, and we got in, and we pulled Cece in…to keep her safe, I
think, but part of Cece hangs outside, so she can connect, but she fills in any
way of escape. Adam, I can barely feel her. Those of us who are loose, we touch
her, and nothing happens. We’re locked in here. Adam, it’s like she doesn’t
want us anymore.”

“Who’s she?” I asked. “Nif, I don’t understand any
of what you’re saying.”

“We need help. Please, Adam…”

The power blinked out, and it stayed out. The
cordless phone in my hand went dead.

I screamed in frustration.

I ran to our hallway closet and tore it open,
looking for that old, corded phone that connected directly to the wall.
Please, please be here.
I found it after
what seemed like hours, and I rushed, plugged it in and dialed.

Nothing happened. I hung up and listened. No dial
tone. Either the phone was broken, or the phone line was dead. I cursed and
threw it across the room.

I went outside, and a group of my neighbors stood
there in the gravel surrounding a boom box. They stared at me, mouths agape. I
must’ve been pretty loud in there.

“I need a cell phone,” I said. “Please!”

No one moved. “Please,” I repeated. “My wife is caught
up in that thing, but she just called me.”

That got them moving. My neighbor lady with all
the dogs pulled out a phone and tossed it to me.

No service.

I jumped on the hood and then the roof of
Scooter’s truck, but the reception didn’t change.

“Mine’s out, too, man,” another guy said. “They
should still work in a power outage, but the tower must’ve been knocked out or
offline. They went out the same time as the electric. So did the radio.”

“
Fuck
,”
I said and jumped down. I handed the woman back her phone and ran back inside.

Think,
think, think
.

I paced back and forth.

Outside, the whip-crack of more explosions ringed
the air, closer this time.

Then, I had an idea. Not a good one, but it was
better than nothing.

I opened the back door, and Hamlet bounded back
inside. He had caught a bug in the mud of the backyard. I left the door open in
case the monster came close, so he could escape. I left the house, jumped into
the truck, and headed out.

In the distance, the city spread like a dark
blanket, punctuated by hundreds of fires. Above, several lights filled the sky.
I couldn’t see the monster, but I watched as red tracer fire from a military
aircraft strafed the darkness below.

The twins
.

Royce and Randy Dominguez. If anybody could come up
with a plan, it’d be them.

Of all my friends, the twins were the only ones I’d
kept from before Nif and I hooked up. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Chuck and
Luke and Monobrow Sam anymore, but everything changed once Nif and I got
together. They all went off to college, off to lives as engineers and
scientists. They thought I was ruining my life by staying behind with her, and
they just moved on, and away, from me.

I didn’t try too hard either to keep in touch. Nif’s
circle was much more accommodating and friendly than I thought they’d be, at
least once I started to look the part.

The twins knew a bit about being ostracized, and
they lived in a community that had accepted them for who they were. They
remained in Tucson, even after their parents moved away. They remained friends
with me, and my new friends, along with all the old guys from high school.

You might not recognize their names, but I bet if
you’ve ever watched television, you’ve seen the twins. They had a reality show
for a while that followed them around high school until the principal kicked
out the camera crews. He’d heard the producers were bribing girls to fake
interest in the twins.

I appeared on the show, too, three whole times,
but this was all before we became close friends. I didn’t have any speaking
parts. Nif showed up a couple times also, scowling in the background.

The sight of Royce and Randy was difficult to get
used to. It’s not every day you go to a new school, take your seat, and realize
the person sitting in front of you has two goddamned heads.

Siamese twins, some people call them. It’s
supposedly an offensive term, but they used it themselves.

In case you don’t know, here’s the info from their
Wikipedia page:

Two heads. Two necks. Normal number of everything
else on the outside—normal for a single individual, that is. On the
inside: two spines that fused together just above the pelvis. Two hearts. Four
lungs, but only two were fully functional. Two stomachs. Three kidneys. One
reproductive system. Each one controlled a side, and they walked kind of funny,
but they ran faster than you might think. One of them (Royce) was a bit more
skewed than the other, but in high school they were both good-looking in their
own way. They had moved to Tucson as infants from Argentina to get treatment
from the University.

I did the whole pretending-not-to-notice thing for
a while, even when the TV crew invaded our school the last half of sophomore
year. When we wound up together in the rocket club, we became friends. I even started
thinking of them as two different people.

It’s funny, how different they were. Both of them
were geniuses, even back then. Royce was more into physics and astronomy, where
Randy loved biology and military history. Both of them were horror buffs, books
and film. They had a thing for circus sideshows and movies about freaks. To
their mother’s dismay, their room was filled with cool posters and action
figures for movies like
Freaks, Basket
Case, House of Wax
, etc.

Randy used to say when they graduated they would
join the Marines and be a sniper team. Their reality show even did this whole
thing where the TV crew took them to the recruiter’s office. The look on the
guy’s face in the office was priceless.

They never did join the Marines.

I asked them once, after we’d been friends awhile,
about how they planned on having separate girlfriends with only one dick. Everyone
wanted to know, but I was the only one brave, or brash, enough to ask. They
were cool, even funny, about it.

“That’ll be the best part,” Royce said.

“We’ll get twice the action,” Randy said. “We both
feel it.”

It turned out this other set of conjoined twin
girls the same age, just like them, lived in Wyoming. The TV producers set it
up so they could meet for the first time, and they had this grand idea that the
four of them would fall in love and have foursomes and all that. It turned out
they hated each other. Randy called one of them a cunt with all the cameras
rolling. That was the end of that.

After high school, the camera crews left them
alone, and the twins went to the U of A. They both graduated in three years
with science degrees—astrophysics for Royce and biology for Randy. They
went to graduate school, and even taught undergrads, but they had to quit over
a medical issue. I don’t know all the details, but they had surgery on their
chest, and afterwards they got tired easily. So they ended up jobless, and played
video games all day. They did have a side business—not quite
legal—but it was pretty lucrative.

They collected and sold guns.

They lived five minutes from me, but it took
almost a half hour to drive to their house. The streets were packed with cars,
some of them abandoned even though the monster hadn’t come this way. I had to
travel the side streets and cut across a park filled with homeless people who
threw beer cans at me as I passed.

Once I got to Royce and Randy’s place, there was
no view of the rest of the city. When I pulled up, the twins were in front of
their house, sitting on a bench and watching the sky. Airplanes and helicopters
continued to strafe the Grinder, but never dropped any bombs. Based on the
position of the aircraft, it looked like it was a good eight miles or more
away, still on the south side of town.

“We were expecting you,” Royce said as I got out.
They wore sweatpants and a ripped T-shirt with Freddy Krueger on the front. The
door to their Jeep was open, and the radio blared RUSH.

Across their lap sat the biggest, weirdest shotgun
I’d ever seen. It only had one barrel, but it sported a rotary wheel like one of
those old school, Al Capone Tommy guns.

“It’s an AA-12,” Royce said as I walked up. “Gas
powered.”

“Good for zombies,” Randy added. “Not so good in
this situation. Her name is Velma.”

“Like the hot chick from
Scooby-Doo
,” Royce said.

“Guys…” I said.

“We heard about Nif,” Randy began. “That Scooter
guy was here, and…”

“She’s alive,” I said, interrupting before he
could go off on one of his tangents. “She called me.” I told them about the
phone call.

“Whoa,” Randy said. “And you’re sure it was her?”

“Of course it was her!” I said. I swallowed. “I
want to help her escape.” I swallowed again. “And I need your help to do it.”

“I’ve already figured it out. It’s an illusion,”
Royce said.

“Goddamnit, Royce, are you listening to me?”

I’d lost him. He just went on with his crazy
theory. “It’s not physically possible for that creature to exist.” He shook his
head while Randy looked on in scorn. “If it was that size, it’d collapse under
its own weight. Though I gotta admit, the human shield angle is pretty smart.
Flesh is especially good at stopping bullets. Plus, there’s the psychological
aspect. I imagine it’s fairly difficult to shoot a missile at a creature when
you see your grandma sitting on its shoulder through the crosshairs.”

“Royce,” I said, taking deep breaths so I didn’t
punch him like I did to Scooter. “It’s not an illusion. Have you looked out
there?” I waved toward the city. “Half the fucking town is on fire. I saw it
born. Didn’t Scooter tell you how it came to be? He saw it, too. He was closer
than I was.”

“Nah,” Royce said. “He was just whining about
getting his truck and cell phone stolen.”

Randy laughed. “His nose is the size of a turnip.
We didn’t know you had it in you.”

“I don’t give a shit about that little fuck,” I
said. “We need…”

“Wait. This is important,” Royce said,
interrupting. That was their thing. Besides having two heads, I mean. They
interrupted. A lot. They drove half our teachers into early retirement. “That
little dude is really pissed about you jacking his truck. He’s got friends with
him, too. Those skinhead bastards. The real ones, not the wannabes. We just
sold him a Glock.”

I paused. “You sold him a gun when you knew he was
looking for me?”

They shrugged. “We didn’t know until after he had
it in his hand,” Royce said.

“But don’t worry,” Randy said. “We gave him a clip
filled with blanks.”

Royce nodded. “Except there might be one in the
chamber. I can’t remember. So try to get him to fire a warning shot first.
After that, you can fuck with him.”

Under other circumstances, the thought of someone pissed
at me enough to buy a gun would freak me out beyond words. But at the moment, I
didn’t give a shit.

“Look. Fuck Scooter. Nif is alive, and the monster
is real. I was there. The actual creature, on its own, is small, no bigger than
a cat. Then, people touch it, or touch an infected person, and they are
instantly attached. It takes over their mind, making them move and rearrange
themselves all around it.” I told them about Cece and everyone at the roller
derby, and the Mexican kid, and how it got into the stadium.

They were both silent when I finished. They looked
deep in thought, and I wondered, not for the first time, if they could secretly
share thoughts with one another.

“So,” Royce said. “I was right. It’s not a giant monster.”

“It’s like a wolf wall,” Randy said. “Or a Swedish
fall. But a lot bigger. And without the cheerleaders.”

“It hit the football game, remember?” Royce said.

“Oh yeah. I guess it did suck up some
cheerleaders. I’m glad we didn’t go. We had a ticket, you know.”

“If I have to sit through one more insipid
football game just so you can get a faggy cheerleader hard-on…”

“Hey, it’s your cock getting hard, too.”

Going off on wild tangents. That was another one
of their things. “
Guys
...” I said,
growing ever more frustrated. “
Please
.”

“Aliens,” Randy said, not missing a step.

“I concur,” Royce said. “Softening us up for an
invasion. Do we know if this is only happening here?”

“I don’t know,” I said. It was the first I thought
of that. Was this happening in other places? If so, that changed a lot of
things. First off, it meant the response to this disaster would be pretty slim
compared to places with larger populations, like, say, Los Angeles and Phoenix.

Randy turned so I could look into his eyes. “The answer
is simple.”

I waited.

“You gotta kill the thing attached to your wife’s
cousin.”

“No shit,” I said. “How do I get to it?”

“We don’t know,” Randy said.

“Listen. You’re the smartest guys I know. I need
ideas. I need to save Nif.”

“She’s in an armored car, right?” Royce asked.
“Interesting. I wonder why it’d do that for her? There must be something
important about her.”

“Whatever you decide,” Randy said, “You better do
it quick. They’re going to drop a MOAB on that thing sooner rather than later,
and that won’t be pretty. It’ll spread soylent green all over the southwest.”

Royce nodded. “We’ll be seeing some fat coyotes in
the coming months.”

“Wait,” Randy said, turning to halfway look at his
brother. “It attaches, even through clothes? What about shoes?”

I remembered a guy kicking at a person when it
first formed. He got stuck, but only after his ankle became lodged. I told them
what I saw.

“I don’t think this is magic,” Randy said, “Just
because we don’t understand it. There must be something physical happening,
probably on a very small scale. The Irukandji jellyfish unleashes these tiny
harpoon-like stingers from its tentacles in order to capture prey. They’re so
small, they can pierce fabric. I bet this is something similar. Only in this
case, it grows fast and immediately connects to your nervous system.”

“And that guy you were talking about,” Royce said.
“You said he wanted to run back to the monster. That means it messes with your
head, even after you’re free. Tell him about the zombie caterpillar thing.”

Randy nodded. “The Glyptapanteles. It’s a
parasitic wasp from Central America. It lays its eggs into the bodies of
caterpillars. The eggs hatch and leave the host, but not before they do some
serious rewiring to the caterpillar’s brain. The larvae emerge from the
caterpillar’s skin and attach to a branch or leaf to pupate. After the larvae
leave, the host caterpillar is still alive, but it’s turned into a giant
guardian zombie. It just hangs out below the pupating wasps, unmoving, starving
to death until a predator comes along and tries to eat the babies. Then it goes
berserk, thrashing about like Monobrow Sam at the Metallica concert. Ha. You
remember that shit? Anyway, it’s been brainwashed into protecting the baby
wasps.”

“Zombies,” Royce said. He patted the gun on their
lap. “Maybe we’ll get to use Velma after all.”

“The point is,” Randy said, “it may seem like an
indestructible, earth-stomping magical beast, but even the craziest biological
entities still have a scientific basis for existing. And that means, there’s
gotta be a way to kill it.”

Hope surged in my chest when he said that. But
only if it meant saving Nif at the same time. My mind was on a roll with
questions. “What about these caterpillars?” I asked. “What happens to them after
the wasps hatch and fly away?”

They shrugged. “They die a day or two later.”

Horrified, I looked between the two. “I don’t want
Nif to die,” I said. “I don’t want her to be a zombie, either.”

Royce patted my shoulder. “Like we said… It sucks.
But there might not be anything you can do. This isn’t the kind of monster
that’s usually defeated by a single dude in the movies.”

“I don’t care about defeating the monster. I just
want to save my wife.” I exhaled. “Or die trying.”

I didn’t realize it until I said it, but I meant
it. I would die to save her. That’s a pretty potent realization, and I know
people say shit like that all the time.
I
can’t live without you, baby
. But I knew it was true. I could feel it in
the beating of my heart. I had run away from the monster earlier—which
was the smart and prudent thing to do, but I had felt so damned guilty and
empty about it. Now I realized why I felt that way.