The Grinding (6 page)

It had flattened out.

Shaped like a giant pancake with the legs of a
millipede, it ripped across Broadway, moving at about ten miles per hour, which
might seem kind of slow if you’re in a car, but it’s terrifying for something
so huge.

On the ground, thousands of people made up the
bottom layer. They hunched forward and backward and sideways like Atlas holding
up the earth as they scrambled across the pavement like migrating bugs. On
their backs rose three or four layers of people mixed with all sorts of other
things…cars, trees, hunks of metal, and other nightmarish figures I couldn’t
discern in the darkness. I saw animals, too, all trapped in the beast. Several
dogs, a couple horses, and other shapes dotted the skin.

I looked for an armored car.
Nif, where are you…
But from our vantage, all we saw was the east
side of the thing. How could I ever get around it to check its other sides? I
couldn’t even tell how big it was…just huge.

The majority of the people wore red shirts from
the stadium, though many were naked or wore yellow from ASU. Some wore night
clothes like they had been ripped from their beds. The top layer was burned to
a black, charred crisp, and fires raged from several points on the beast. Most
of the people on the bottom appeared alive, though they had broken bones and
missing pieces, while everyone on the top layer were dead, at least from our
perspective.

The whole thing looked like a cross section of a
giant lasagna, with the ground beef on top.

Several human tentacles whipped in the air above
the monstrosity. As we watched in horror, one tentacle picked up a motorcycle
and tossed it like a fastball toward something behind it in the neighborhood.

As I looked at the beast, I felt a strange tingle
in my chest and head. This was new, something I hadn’t yet felt, not my usual
horror and worry. It was like fingers poking at me, or like an invisible string
went from me to the monstrosity, pulling ever so slightly, urging me, tempting
me to go forward, into the Grinder.

That was insane, of course, to go into the Grinder
and be used as a top-level meat shield. I bit my lip as I realized I had my
hand on the door handle.

Randy swore and slammed the Jeep into reverse. The
tires squealed as we backed away. “Get that gun ready!”

It took me a moment to grasp he’d said that to me,
and I took my hand off the door and clutched the automatic shotgun. I didn’t
know how to shoot it. I guessed a simple trigger pull, but was there more to it?
A safety or anything else special? Even if I figured all that out, where in the
hell would I shoot? All those people… Who was alive? Dead? Who the fuck knew.

Plus, it was moving on while we headed in reverse.
The monster kept morphing and rolling, now a long train headed north across the
street. It seemed bigger than even after it attacked the stadium, despite the
full-press of the military. It wasn’t very tall at this moment, but it just
kept going and going.

A Humvee with a mounted machine gun roared past
us. The soldier at the gun fired a stream of bullets that streaked through the
night air like fireflies into the lowest level of the beast.

The bullets tore through the people, who fell
apart and away. Pieces of the shielding debris from the second level of the
creature cascaded onto the street. Our Jeep swerved as Randy tried to turn us
around, ramming a bus stop with a loud, jarring crunch. He put the Jeep into
drive, and the back wheels spun.

We were stuck.

We looked on in horror as the thing turned on the
Humvee. I didn’t see from where it was thrown, but a dark shape smashed into
the front of the military vehicle, flipping it. Two more round missiles
streaked from the top of the beast, one of them overshooting the soldiers and
skidding into the road in front of where we were jammed.

It was a pig, I think.

“Come on, come on, come
on
,” I said.

The Jeep’s engine whined, along with Randy. “I’m
trying, damn it.”

One of the soldiers crawled out of the overturned
truck, and he ran in our direction, dragging his hurt leg. Behind him, the
massive Grinder had stopped.
What the…?
Its attention was on the guys fleeing from the truck, toward us.

Terrified, I watched as a tentacle swept down from
above and swiped at the injured soldier. Its reach wasn’t quite long enough,
and the man looked like he might get away.

He didn’t.

Another tentacle swung at him, only this time, the
longer and thicker arm broke apart in mid-air, raining people and something
else—big, mean-looking dogs I realized—on the road all around the
soldier. The people and animals rolled and skidded as they hit the ground. Some
didn’t get back up, but about fifteen people and several dogs did.

The soldier was surrounded. He yelled something at
the people circling around him, but I couldn’t hear. He pulled a pistol from
his side. Someone in the group said something, and the soldier yelled back. The
group of dogs, and one coyote, I saw, moved behind him. The snarling pack
dodged and snapped at him, closing in on one side, opening up on another side.
Why didn’t they full-on attack him? Then I realized what was happening.

They were herding him toward the Grinder.

I leaned in toward Randy and Royce. “Should we
help him?” I asked.

We all snapped at the sound of a gunshot. It was the
soldier. He fired again, at a woman stepping toward him, and she went down. The
others pounced, and the dogs barked and growled and jumped, acting very
dog-like and un-zombie-like, which I thought was strange. All these people,
these animals, were no longer connected to the creature, yet they still worked for
it, which was scary as hell.

I looked out the back of the Jeep as Randy revved
the engine, trying to free us. We were getting nowhere. and the noisy revving
made me nervous. “Stop that shit,” I hissed. “You’re attracting attention to
us.”

We were too damned scared to get out and jack up
the Jeep. We watched as the people threw the soldier onto the ground and
violently disarmed him. They dragged him, kicking and screaming back toward the
beast, close enough for a tentacle to reach down and pick him up. Like before,
he froze the moment the arm came into contact with his face. Some of the human
drones and all of the dog ones remained detached.

(Look, I don’t know what else to call them as I
explain this shit to you. They weren’t really zombies like how you’d think. I
mean, the soldier had shot one, and she’d dropped like a bowling ball. An
undead zombie would’ve eaten the bullets and kept coming. This was more like
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. Pod
People. Drones, working for a singular entity. So that’s what I’m going with.)

Anyway, the scene was disturbing on a gut level.
They were all so systematic, so deliberate in their gruesome tasks. The dog
drones pulled the bodies of their fallen human brethren back into the reach of
the Grinder. Other human drones swarmed the crashed Humvee, working together to
flip it over. They organized and talked with one another. They acted normal.
They managed to flip it over, and they pulled out the remaining soldiers, all
of whom appeared dead. They knelt and rifled through their bodies, and they
took their weapons.

They left the corpses of the other soldiers on the
road. One of the drones climbed into the back of the truck and took position at
the gun, fiddling with it while the others pushed the vehicle into the waiting
mass of the Grinder. A gaping, dripping hole appeared in the side of the
Grinder to swallow the truck, and it ate it whole.

“That is some of the most fucked-up shit I’ve ever
seen.”

That was Royce. He whispered it, the fear evident
in his voice.

I had a more practical question. “Why did they
leave the dead soldiers, but keep their own dead?”

“I don’t know, man,” he said. He just shook his
head. “Fucked up…”

The Grinder was eerily still. The sound of gunfire
rang in the distance,
ching-ching-ching
,
like a thousand blacksmiths working at once. Even in the car, the air smelled
of sulfur and oil. I suspected the soldiers in the Humvees acted in concert,
and they had attacked from several angles at once. And as we waited, similar
scenes were playing out on nearby streets that also flanked the side of the
beast. Above, the planes had backed off.

On the street, the dogs still dragged bodies back
to the Grinder. Once a body got there, an attached body reached down and
touched the corpse. Nothing happened at first, but after a few moments, the
dead bodies jerked up and disappeared into the mass, moving in that fast,
staccato way I had seen earlier, like they were controlled by a puppeteer in a
hurry to take a break for a piss.

The dogs came out again, and they started to pull
at another form on the ground, dragging it back.

It was a pig missile. Another one was crashed on
the asphalt near the destroyed Humvee, and a third—

“
Oh, shit
,”
I said.

The third remained on the ground—outside my
door.

“We gotta run for it,” I said. “They’re headed
toward us. They’re going to see or hear or smell us...”

“This was a bad idea,” Royce said. He picked up
one of the black duffel bags and put it over his neck. They scooted over and
opened the passenger-side door, the one facing away from the Grinder. Randy
grabbed the second bag. They stepped outside, and I opened my door to follow.
We crouched low behind the disabled Jeep.

They rummaged through one of the bags, each one
pulling stuff out. Royce produced a strange, flat machine gun that looked
almost fake. I’d never seen anything like it. Randy took a long magazine and
slapped it on the top.

“It’s a P90,” Royce said. “Low recoil, fast
reload.”

“Where do you get this shit?” I asked.

“Houston,” he said.

“I want you to promise us something,” Randy said.

“What?”

“Don’t let us become part of that thing.”

“Yeah,” Royce said. “We already know what it’s
like to have more than one brain in a single body. It’s crowded enough in here,
and we don’t share well.”

“So, what do you want me to do? Shoot you?”

“Yes,” Royce said. “If it comes to that, yes.”

I felt a chill, realizing it might come to that. I
nodded. I looked around for an escape. My hands trembled as I clutched the
shotgun.

To our left, rows of dark houses sat, but there
wasn’t an easy way in without jumping a fence. The Grinder had come from that
direction, but the houses hadn’t been damaged. Still, it was the best way to
go. To our right, we would have to cross several lanes of open road and then
navigate our way through a large cluster of commercial buildings and parking
garages.

I peered over the hood, and the dogs struggled
with the second pig. The distant sound of machine-gun fire rattled the night. I
sunk back down.

“There are more Marines on the other side,” Royce
said. “It sounds like they’re doing better than these guys did.”

“I think we should just run,” I said. “While it’s
distracted. We’ll wait for it to pass, snag an abandoned car, and go around the
back.”

“We can’t go very fast,” Randy said. “Not anymore.
Not like in high school.”

“Our lungs,” Royce added.

“Well, let’s just go. Keep low, and maybe it won’t
see us. Or care. I mean, it had to have seen the Jeep, but it ignored us. It
only cares about the soldiers. We’re not a threat.”

“Okay,” Randy said. “Let’s do it.”

I peeked over the hood one last time—straight
into the eyes of a growling, slobbering, your-ass-is-mine dog.

This wasn’t just any dog, either. I knew the breed.
I had seen a whole special on them a year or so ago on TV. I had nightmares for
a month afterward. A Presa Canario. That’s Spanish for big-ass, mean-ass, eats-pit-bulls-as-a-snack
mastiff.

I hadn’t heard it come up. Nor did I have time to ponder
the coincidence that the dog growling at me at that very moment was the exact
breed of dog that most terrified me. All I knew was I had to keep from pissing
myself and simultaneously bring the shotgun to bear and pull the trigger, just
as the dog leapt onto the hood of the Jeep.

Firing a shotgun is a lot different than firing smaller
guns. That’s the only excuse I have for missing a target right in front of me.
With a shotgun. I fell backwards at the recoil, my ears ringing, and for a
quick moment, I continued to scream, for I thought for sure the dog was on me.
I looked up.
Oh, thank Christ.
It was
dead on the hood of the car.

Aloud, I thanked the twins. They had shot it with
their machine gun.

They nodded. “We gotta go.”

We took off jogging toward the line of fences. A
small, narrow alley offered refuge from the main street, and escape into the
next neighborhood over.

I looked over my shoulder. More dogs. Three of
them, about 100 meters away, and they booked it right towards us. Behind them,
about ten human drones also rushed in our direction.

As we approached the alley, a loud crashing noise
filled the night. It came from in front of us. Through the space of the alley,
we could see the next street down. I watched as the row of houses tumbled and
crumbled as the tail end of the Grinder rolled over them, and right toward us.
Both ends converged on another like a giant Pac-man, and we were the dot in the
middle.

“Wrong way,” I yelled, and we turned, angling away
from the monster and the advance party of dogs and people chasing us. Despite
what they said, the twins held their own in terms of speed, running in a kind
of strange, side-gallop that allowed them to shoot and run at the same time.

They shot all three dogs, who tumbled forward with
the momentum of their unnatural speed. The drones kept coming, all of them
twenty-something males. Another burst of the machine gun, and the closest two
fell.