The Grinding (15 page)

He leaned close and whispered in my ear. “Just so
you know, before you die. After we got Nif fucked up on meth, we took turns with
her right there in the record store.
She
would beg for it
.”

My memory of what happened next comes back to me
in slow motion, even though it happened in a second.

The whole time I’d been on the floor, I’d been
reaching toward my leg—and the Rambo knife. By the time Scooter had whispered
in my ear, my hand was firmly grasping the handle. I was poised to push the gun
away with my left hand and plunge the knife into his chest with my right. If I
couldn’t get the knife into him, hopefully he’d fire a shot in the confusion,
which would clear the barrel of a possible real bullet.

That was the plan, at least.

I’ve been told I have a long fuse. I’m a friendly
guy, and like I’ve mentioned, I avoid genuine confrontation. As a manager, I’d
act the part of an asshole, but I really wouldn’t be mad when I was ordering
employees around. I was just playing a role. I would get irritated, and I would
snap and sometimes even berate the teenage staff, but it was all for show, and
I almost always felt bad afterward.

Even when I’d punched Scooter earlier, it was
because I was frustrated and irritated, but I wasn’t enraged.

Monobrow Sam used to joke that one would have to
literally piss in my cornflakes before I’d feel anger. They’d tease me to get a
response, and I’d pretend to get all irate just to get them to leave me alone.

This time was different.

I felt fury. I didn’t believe what Scooter had said
about Nif, of course. Still, something darker and more blinding than anything
I’d ever felt welled up in me and burst out in a volcanic eruption of
Vesuvius-strength rage.

I launched up from the floor and tackled Scooter
with every scrap of my adrenaline-fueled might. I had the knife in my hand, but
I didn’t even think to use it. It went flying as I rushed him. Scooter’s head smashed
against the metal mixer we used for the coleslaw.

At the same moment I attacked Scooter, Dale took
his baseball bat, and he smashed Hippo in the head with his full might. The
impact sounded like a lightning strike. Hippo dropped like a bag of bowling
balls, and Dale turned on the other guy. They started beating the shit out of
each other with the bats like they thought they were samurai warriors, knocking
over things and banging across the kitchen in a whirlwind of shrieking,
skinhead rage. I barely had time to register what the hell was going on. Still,
this distraction saved my life.

I no longer cared about the stupid gun or being
shot in the head, so blinded by absolute ferocity I was. I thought of the
words, written in blood on the wall at the school
. Come not within the measure of my wrath
. I turned the table over
so it crashed onto Scooter’s legs. He lifted the gun and pointed it at my face.

He fired.

The concussion of sound and the smoke and fire
belching from the barrel, just five feet from my face, blinded me.

I should’ve been dead, right then. Either he’d
already fired off the live round in the chamber, or there never was one there
in the first place. Either way, I didn’t die. Scrambling to get up, I reached
for the utensil rack hanging from the ceiling and pulled it hard to the ground,
and onto Scooter’s head.

A long, second-level rotisserie skewer pierced his
neck. He looked at me in absolute surprise, his dumb eyes registering nothing
but pain and shock. He tried to say something. Nothing came out. He lifted the
gun again in my direction, but I took two steps forward, stepping over the
rack, and I stepped hard on his hand. I picked up the gun.

The Rambo knife lay on the ground by his head, and
I picked it up too, wiping the oil off on my chest. I sheathed it onto my leg.

Scooter gurgled and struggled some, but after a
moment, he stopped moving. His eyes stared up at mine in death.

She would
beg for it.

I spit in his face.

“Fuck you, Scooter,” I said.

I turned toward the two battling skinheads, who
had paused to stare at me. Both looked wide-eyed at the gun in my hands. If
they realized that the gun was shooting blanks, they didn’t let on.

“Get the hell out of here,” I said. They ran like
rabbits, falling over each other to get away.

On the ground, Hippo groaned. Dale had smashed his
head in, but why? My anger abated as quickly as it rose, but I knew I had to
deal with him now.

“Stay down,” I said, pointing the gun at his head.

He made a bleating noise and tried to sit up. I
pulled the trigger, to scare him.

Hippo’s head exploded as the bullet tore into his
forehead. A wide spray of blood, shaped like a fan, spread out the back of his
head and over the wall behind him. He collapsed to the floor, dead.

I dropped the gun in shock.

Behind me, I heard the
glub, glub, glub
of dripping Italian dressing in the
otherwise-silent room. I turned to stare at a shelf near the ceiling. The
dressing container was there, leaking from the hole made by Scooter’s bullet.

So, no blanks after all. He’d just shot and
missed.

Outside, tires squealed as one or both of the
skinheads fled in whatever they were driving.

I picked the gun up and wiped it off. It read “Sig
Sauer P226” on the side.

This wasn’t the gun the twins had given him.

Still clutching the gun in my shaking hands, I
picked up my duffel and staggered out of the restaurant.
Fucking’ A
. I turned and stared at the open door for a few moments,
knowing no matter what happened, I would never again go inside this place.

I leaned against the Volkswagen as I tried to
catch my breath. The side of my head ached, and my ear on the other side of my
head, where the bee or wasp had stung me earlier throbbed almost as painfully.

I’d killed somebody. I’d killed two people. But this
was different than me shooting to defend myself, like with those guys under the
monster’s control. Now I’d shot a regular person. An asshole, yes. Self-defense?
I guess. I looked at my hand, and it stopped shaking as I came to terms with
what I’d done. I don’t know what that meant, but it felt significant.

A Vespa scooter sat parked nearby, obscured in the
thick fog. That was Scooter’s old ride. He’d switched to the truck last year.

She would
beg for it.

I didn’t, I
wouldn’t
believe him. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. In the midst of her drug
rehab, Nif had said all sorts of things, including that she’d fucked everybody
in town. Later, she’d admitted it was a lie designed to hurt me. I hadn’t
believed it then, and I didn’t believe it now.

I strode forward and kicked the Vespa over. It
crunched.

The Grinder now moved away from me, further north
into the city. The intensity of the feeling hadn’t changed much since I’d left
Clementine’s house. I wondered about that, why guys like Gobo who seemed fine
one moment, would suddenly give in to the urge to sulk away toward the beast.

I heard the planes again, an occasional, distant high-flying
whine in the sky, just not as constant or intense. I hadn’t heard an explosion
in almost an hour. Had they lost sight of the monster in the fog? Or had they
given up?

Of course they wouldn’t just give up. And I knew whatever
came next, it would be bad.

The side of my head throbbed. I slipped into the
driver’s seat and turned the key. As I tossed the duffel into the passenger’s
seat, I saw a small blue bag sitting on the floor. I picked it up.

I laughed. It was a bank bag from the safe. Dale
must have found money in there after all, and he’d slipped it through the
cracked window. So he had planned on stealing it. Hippo must have accused him while
I talked to Scooter, and Dale reacted out of guilt and anger, smashing in his
buddy’s head, because that’s what those guys did. They reacted by fighting. Or
maybe Dale had quick reflexes, and he used the distraction of me fighting
Scooter to make his move. I’d never know. I threw the bank bag and the gun into
the duffel. I doubted I’d have use for either, but one never knew.

I tossed the car into drive, turned up the radio,
and headed north.

It was time to save Nif.

I could feel the Grinder. I followed its path. I
turned north on First Avenue, and if it weren’t for the fog, I would’ve had a
straight, line-of-site view of the monster. Instead, all I could see along my
slow cruise was the hood of the VW and a twenty-foot span of rubble, abandoned
cars, and the occasional C-2.

The satellite radio’s coverage had been spotty and
unreliable for a while, but now I couldn’t find a station that worked. I didn’t
know if it was the fog or what, but I could only get snippets of audio before
I’d get an error message on the screen. What I did hear was old news, or crap
that didn’t make sense.

“…population of almost 600,000 while Pima County
as a whole is closer to 900,000. We’re not seeing anywhere near those numbers,
even after we factor in all the refugee groups, including those who are
crossing into Mexico. Assuming the monster creature has captured or killed
100,000, that means there is still a huge population…”

“…mythology calls it a chimera, and based on this
new photograph, that’s…”

“…the San Diego zoo, which is approximately 360
miles west…”

The road became too difficult to traverse, and I
had to take a side street. This was a poor part of town, and that meant fewer
people here were able to evacuate. To my right, the houses and trailers were destroyed,
every single one of them, like someone had taken a giant potato masher and
smashed each one in turn. To my left, the houses remained untouched, though
blackened with soot and dust. Groups of people stood in their yards, all
looking shell-shocked and afraid.

I passed a group of three people fighting with a
young woman. I recognized her as a C-2. They held her down as she tried to get
away. She kicked and screamed and bit, just to get back.

As I watched, I thought again of the old lady and
the tadpoles, about what she told me that day.

The Lord
doesn’t care about the beasts of this world
.

The now-familiar snare-drum roll of machine gun
fire perforated the fog. I was thankful to hear it. If the military still had
soldiers on the ground, I had time.

I moved across the street, passing from a
residential area to a more industrial part of town—the type of
neighborhood that was fine by day, but you wanted to avoid at night. While
low-rent apartment complexes and pay-by-the-hour hotels littered the main road,
the deep parts of this area were filled with small junkyards, some commercial,
some just houses that ended up that way. There were scrap metal businesses, the
occasional mechanic, and several warehouses. Despite the cool November weather,
weeds grew waist-high along the road. Every flat, vertical surface was covered
in that cursive, impossible-to-read graffiti.

The majority of streets in Tucson ran straight
north-south or east-west, but in industrial places like this, they were haphazard.
I needed a turn-off before I got mired in the side-street maze. This fog was dark,
worse than the night, and the only compass I had was the Grinder itself,
separated only by a few small streets. If it turned eastward, I’d be screwed.

More gunshots rang, closer this time, followed by
cries and screams. I couldn’t see anybody or anything, and with the fog and
twisted streets, I wasn’t sure where it came from. I reached into the duffel
and pulled out Scooter’s handgun. I tossed the VW into reverse. I wasn’t so
sure the gunfire was military. No matter who it was, I didn’t want to be near
it.

Out of the fog they came.

Hundreds of people. Running and screaming and
trampling like a stampede of wildebeest. They scattered on either side of the
car, blocking me, running west to east
toward
the Grinder, but they clearly fled something rather than deliberately headed
toward the monster. Some jumped on the hood of the car, scrambling over to get
away.

People fell, and they were trampled upon.

“Hey,” I yelled out the window. “Don’t go that
way.
You’re headed into a trap
.”
Nobody listened. All of them were in a blind panic.

What the hell? Who were these people, and what
were they running from? They couldn’t be running from the Grinder. Was it the
military? It didn’t feel right. These people were goddamned terrified. Then I
remembered where I last saw people this panicked, just a couple hours earlier.

The bugs.

Holy fuck tacos. I already felt the creeping,
crawling legs skittering over my arms. I put the car into gear and inched forward,
but I couldn’t bring myself to mow anyone down. I rolled up the window, though
I knew that wouldn’t do shit against a large swarm. People kept coming, mobs
and mobs of them. A few carried bags and suitcases as they fled, but the
majority ran empty-handed, or they held tightly onto small children.

The mob thinned, and those who remained were
families. Moms and dads struggled with their children. Older people limped
past, helped along by the younger. A woman looked over her shoulder as she ran,
not paying attention to where she was going. She slammed into the car door, and
the screaming child in her arms wailed even louder. The woman picked herself up
and continued running.

The fallen littered the street, but most of them
were still alive. I felt helpless. I had to get the fuck away. I had driven
over corpses earlier, but I couldn’t drive over an innocent person who was
still alive. No way. As much as the coward inside of me wanted to, I just
couldn’t. I remembered my father, trying to get home one night while driving
through a block party. He’d revved the engine and pushed forward, knocking over
a little girl holding an ice cream cone. The cops had come that night, and we
moved the next day.

A man and a woman kneeled over a little boy, no
older than four years old, with an apparent hurt ankle. He sat in the middle of
the street, clutching his leg, screaming. In one hand the little boy also held
what I thought was a black pistol. The woman spied me and banged on the car’s
window.

“Help us, please! They’re coming.”

Gah. Damn
it!

“Get in,” I said.

They rushed around to the passenger side and
ripped open the door. I tossed my gun back in the bag and pulled it aside to
make room. The woman and boy got in the back seat, and the man jumped in the
front. The man and the woman were about 35 years old, professional types. I
imagined the mom probably drove a Volvo and the guy had a suit-and-tie job with
a secretary who picked up his dry cleaning.

“Go,” the guy said. “
Go!
”

In the back, the boy wailed while the mom rocked
him back and forth. “It’s okay, honey,” she said. “It’ll be okay.” I looked
again at the black gun in the boy’s hand―just a plastic toy. The orange
tip on the barrel had been ripped off.
That’s
not going to do you much good, little man
.

I drove around a few more people laying in the
street. Once I was clear, I punched it. We drove, following the street, which
curved away from the Grinder but toward the unseen threat.

“You’re going the wrong way!” the guy said.

“I know, I know.” I cut across a parking lot for a
cab company. I laid on the accelerator and smashed through the padlocked
chain-link gate just like they did in the movies. I curved around the parked
cabs and broke through the fence on the other side, tires squealing as I
righted myself.

“I can’t believe that worked,” I said, continuing
to drive north.

“Turn right, turn right!” he cried. I looked over
my shoulder, but I still couldn’t see anything.

“I can’t,” I said. I pointed east to where he
wanted me to go. Through the fog, just a few streets over it loomed, a black
tint to the haze, way too close.

“What is that?” the mom asked.

“
It’s the
fucking monster
,” I said.

“Oh God, oh God,” she said as the child wailed.

To our right, a tall warehouse imploded, dust and
wood rocketing away from the crushed structure. I squealed the car to the left
as something large smashed into the road where we’d just been.

“Fuck,” I cried.

“You’re headed right for them,” the man said. He
reached for the wheel, but I turned right again, pushing him away.

“
The
motherfucking Grinder is right fucking there
,” I said. “Did you not just
see what happened? It threw something at us. I’m going the only way I can.”

“They told us it was on the other side of town,”
the man said, looking back. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Keep going. Go as fast as
you can.”

“Who are you people?” I asked. “Where did you all
come from? And what the hell is chasing you? Is it the bugs?” I continued
north, once again in a residential area. We left the Grinder behind, and I
relaxed a little. Trailer parks decayed on both sides of the street. A few
people stood on the sidewalks, watching us pass, unaware or uncaring of their
proximity to the monster. We were ahead of the Grinder now, which had paused on
the street, probably to gobble up the fucking lemmings headed toward it.
Despite the man’s plea for speed, I slowed, not wanting to run over anybody.
Whatever it was, we were far away enough now, especially with so many others on
foot.

“We were all stuck on I-10, headed toward
Phoenix,” the man said. He reached over to shake my hand. “Thank you. Thank you
for picking us up. I’m Uri, and this is my wife Michelle, and the little guy
here is our son, Patrick.”

“I’m Adam,” I said, awkwardly taking his hand as I
drove. The man’s handshake felt weaker than I expected, and it was covered with
sweat. “Whatever you were running from, it herded you straight toward the
Grinder. Most everyone you were with has probably been captured.”

“Oh God,” the woman named Michelle said. She
looked at her husband. “Cindy and Paul and McKenzie, did you see if they were
headed that way?”

“Our neighbors. Keep going, keep going,” Uri said,
seeing I had slowed down. He turned back to his wife. “I didn’t see Paul, but…
I saw Cindy. Honey, she didn’t make it. She had McKenzie with her.”

“Why is this happening?” Michelle said, crying and
hugging the little boy, whose air-raid wail had lowered, but only slightly. I
didn’t blame him. I wanted to scream, too, but I had to keep it together. For
myself, for this family in my car. For Nif.

“What was it?” I asked again.

“They tried to quarantine us,” Uri said. “But it
started to fall apart. Buses are supposed to pick us up at the I-19 exchange
and take us to Tubac. A whole mess of soldiers in chemical suits were set up at
Picacho Peak, and they lined the freeway, making sure we didn’t go off road.
The cars were gridlocked, so we had to walk. We’ve been walking for hours. A
couple people tried to run, and they…they shot them. Then it got foggy, and
people were slipping away. We should’ve run when we had the chance.”

“They would’ve shot us, too,” Michelle said.

“Right before you picked us up, something came at
us, from the right side of the street. There were hundreds of them.”

“Bugs?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “At least I don’t think so. These
were bigger. I…”

“Look out!” Michelle called.

I slammed the brakes as a dark shape jumped off
the roof of a building and landed in the street in front of me. Roof tiles
scattered around its feet.

“What the hell is that?” I asked.

It was distinctively cat-shaped, only it was
almost twice as large as the biggest lion I had ever seen. It had no
discernible eyes or ears, and dual tails swung behind it, swishing independently
like snakes in Medusa’s hair. Michelle and little Patrick screamed while Uri
yelled, “Back, back, back!”

What the
fuck? Where had this thing come from? There’s more than one monster now
? I
tossed the gear into reverse and slammed the pedal.

We didn’t get far. Two more of the lion monsters
stalked into the street behind me. I screeched to a stop. We were trapped
between the creatures.

“I’m going to ram it,” I said, throwing the car
back into drive. I was afraid I would drop the damned transmission right out of
the Volkswagen.

“
Be careful
,”
Uri said.

I shot forward, and instead of getting out of the
way or rearing up like a massive grizzly bear, the black lion thing jumped
right at us. I screamed like a little girl.

As it flew, it broke apart into several pieces.
Rats. Mice. Cats. A couple raccoon-looking-things I’d seen before, but I didn’t
know what they were called. All of them hurled through the air, pissed off and
hissing and snarling as they smashed into the windshield, cracking it in two
different places.

I understood, then. These were mini-Grinders. They
had broken off the main mass, sent to herd people to the monster. If the people
tried to escape, then the small mammals that made up the whole were given the
pleasure of tearing the people into chowder.

The animals flew over the car or got run over, but
a few smaller mice stuck in the reservoir where the windshield wipers were
stored―and found passage under the hood.

A single cat still gripped the cracks in the windshield,
hissing and spitting and clawing to get in. An old orange tabby, its claws
screeching against the glass.

“
Do
something
,” Michelle called.

I slammed the brakes, and the cat went flying. I
went forward again, and the car jumped as we splattered the cat across the
asphalt. (Just for the record, I felt bad about running over the cat, even though
it wanted to eat our livers.)

“That’s what attacked you earlier?” I asked.

Uri nodded. “There were birds, too. And other
shapes.”

“We gotta get the hell out of here,” I said. Just
as I turned the corner, the engine let out a loud
pop
, sputtered twice and died.
Son
of a bitch
. Smoke poured from the A/C vent. As I pulled to a stop, Uri
screamed and kicked. The mice. Three of them fell from behind the dash and onto
his legs. One of them, its fur flaming, screamed like a miniature kamikaze.