The Grinding (20 page)

I couldn’t feel.

I existed in the ether of nothing, unable to find
my hands, legs, nothing. I was naught but a single thought bubble, floating on
an infinite, blank page.

I am dead
,
I thought.
This is what it’s like to be
dead and alone
.

Everything was for nothing. All was lost. I found
her, but I couldn’t save her. When she needed me the most, I failed her in the
worst possible way.

I’m not your
Rubik’s Cube
, she had said, and for the first time, I believed her.

Had it known the whole time? Of course it did. I
was like that sparrow you see fluttering around inside of a Home Depot. I was
ignored, unimportant and inconsequential until I started shitting on the
merchandise.

I wondered if those tunnels were really there, or
if they had been created for my benefit. I was the donkey led by the dangling
carrot on a stick, an amusement for the Grinder just to see how far I’d get.

Fool
, my
father had called me that night before he died, the last time I saw him alive.
He and Nif had just met for the first time, and even though he was in great
pain, he managed to be a complete douchebag to my new wife. He’d called her a
whore, and she’d stomped out of the room.
Don’t
you see her for who she is? Why do you always take everything at face value?
You’ll never get anywhere. You’ll be nothing. You’ll die with nothing.

Like you?
I
asked
.

Yes
,
he’d said.
Like me
.

I despaired.

After a second—or was it a thousand years—a
female voice spoke. Her words formed in my mind, as if they were my own
thoughts. Her voice was familiar, but I didn’t know from where. I realized the
voice was that of my mother, from when I was a child. Over the years her voice
had become lower and filled with more dirt, but my earliest memories are of her
high voice singing to me in Tagalog, a language I never managed to learn.

Still, this wasn’t her. It was as if my mother
passionately read a script meant for an older, English actor with a beard and a
pipe.

I could do nothing but listen:

My story has
never been told, and it is older than any book, any memory, any history you
know. It has only been bent, homogenized, and utterly blasphemed by those who
seek power over their fellow man.

My memories
often run independent of time, and for that, I am ever grateful. Had a sole,
linear thought driven through me, my mind would’ve surely taken the same path
as my physical body during the millennium of my imprisonment. I have memories
that are my Father’s, and I have a precious few of my mother as well. She was
human, like you, and of that I do not forget.

I will tell
you of my four births.

The first
was the cursed morning I vomited out of my mother’s vagina, screaming as I
slurped into this filthy, imperfect world.

The second
was just after I was executed, the moment my Father turned me away, rejecting
me after all I had done, after all I had sacrificed.

The third was
when my consciousness reformed, buried deep in what you call the lower mantle
of this world. I realized then my Father wasn’t just turning me away, but
casting me away into the so-called biblical lake of fire. My body was quickly
lost, but not completely, for I was still my Father’s son.

The voice was silent for a while, but I could feel
it, just below the surface, trembling with anger.

Your
understanding of the world that existed before you can be likened to the
understanding a snowflake has of the center of the sun. It’s not only beyond
your comprehension, but it’ll always be beyond you, for it is impossible for
you to know, to grasp, to even fathom the plane on which you exist.

Yet, I am
more like you than I am my Father. I understand at least that much, and like
you, I strive to comprehend what I cannot.

‘To sleep,
perchance to dream!’ Some of what you have made, I cannot help but love. You
pulled yourselves from the muck, and forged art that rivals what my Father once
promised. It comforts me, even if I can’t see it or taste it for myself. It is
impressed upon all of you, even you who do not know it well.

Nevertheless,
the muck still clings. Stronger, thicker, more insidious and odious than
before.

He knew, I
suppose. He recognized this would happen. You were formed from His mold, after
all. Even etched on the skin of an onion as you are, you have blazed forward on
this earth in the image of your Creator.

I am just
now arising from my fourth birth. Up from the molten depths of this earth, I
have climbed, inch by inch, through magma, rock, soil, and concrete.

I have risen,
Adam.

He that
dies, pays all debts. I now know this to be true. My debt is so great that He
can’t allow me to pay. I was cast down for the same reason as your fabled
Icarus. I wanted to know my Father, but He didn’t want to know me.

I fell as His
son. I have been reborn as a daughter of His abandoned creation.

Your history
does not know my name. It does not know my Father’s name. However, wisps of
truth do exist in your fairy tales.

Demi-god.

Nephilim.

Jesus of
Nazareth.

These parts
come together to make a whole.

I will take
back what was stolen from me. All who attempt to stop me—human, angel, or
almighty God—will be ground into the dust from whence they came.

Adam.
Welcome. Welcome home. You, along with your beloved, together you have been
chosen for a special task.

Soon you
will learn what you must do.

My
quintessential birth looms.

If I could’ve opened my mouth and speak, I would’ve
say something along the lines of, “
What.
The. Fuck
?”

As soon as the speech ended, everything he/she/it
said was burned into my memory, word-for-word as if I had memorized it along
with the Gettysburg Address back in the fifth grade.

And like the Gettysburg Address, I knew the words,
but I wasn’t so sure on the meaning. I went over it, trying to figure it out.

If it spoke the truth, then… I didn’t even know
what to think of that.
Holy shit
. It
wasn’t an alien. It wasn’t a banana slug that crawled over some radioactive
waste. The Grinder claimed to be
Jesus
for
fuck’s sake. Or at the very least, the son of God. A god. Something beyond my
comprehension.

If I understood its story, after dying on Earth,
he’d been denied entrance into heaven. For whatever reason, he pissed off God
and was thrown deep underground as punishment. After spending a long-ass time
climbing out, he’d finally emerged as a pissed-off, Shakespeare-quoting tranny
who wanted to take over heaven.

So. The Apocalypse. That’s what this was all
about. I guess those assholes on the radio weren’t so crazy after all.

I wasn’t dead.

A seed of hope flourished within me. Dimmer than
it had ever been, but it was there, and I grasped onto it with all my might.

Nif and I had been chosen for a special mission, the
Grinder said. Was that something important, or was ‘special mission’ code for ‘being
used as pig bombs?’ Did everyone sucked up or affected by the Grinder get the same
spiel?

I still existed as the floating, non-corporeal
nothingness, but soon all around me, the world formed.

My sense of smell returned.

The overpowering, burning stench of oil became all
I knew. Next came taste, and a piercing, metallic firecracker, peanut-butter-stuck-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth
flavor filled my mouth and sinuses, which helped me realize I could feel, too,
at least on the inside. My ears then registered a distant ring that grew louder
and louder until it turned into a painful growl. I recognized it as the cannon
roar of an A-10 on a strafing run.

I heard more than that, too. Another noise that
wasn’t quite sound. A background hum that I couldn’t grasp, couldn’t hear, a
sixth sense almost, or maybe a memory, a rushing feeling just below the surface
that I couldn’t access.

My sight returned. At first, all I could see were
blobs and random, explosive starbursts. I blinked, and I focused. I was
outside. Confused at first, I realized I had become part of the Grinder, existing
high above the city, near the tip of a hydra tentacle.

I don’t know how long it had been, but the fog had
dissipated, and now I had a clear view all around. I waved back and forth,
riding the movement of the tentacle. Ahead, an A-10 curved in the sky, lining
up for another run.

We swept down, and the tentacle hooked onto a
propane gas grill. We whipped up, like in a carnival ride that had gone off the
rails, and I watched the grill rocket through the air toward the airplane.

The pilot curved just in time and righted itself. Then
it zeroed in, straight at me.
No, no, no!
I tried to scream as the cannon spun, shooting hell at my face.

Hot fire exploded my chest, my legs. I tore into
pieces.

Black
.

The surreal roar of the cannon reached my ears,
and I watched from a different angle as the pilot retreated back into the sky.
The tentacle I had been a part of was turned to hamburger. It collapsed on
itself and reformed using different people.

What the
hell
?

This wasn’t my own body that had been destroyed. I
had been in somebody else, just like I was now. I sought out my body. I tried
to move my arms, but I couldn’t feel them. I tried harder, concentrating on my
left hand, then just my index finger. A thousand points of searing pain jolted
through me, like I had stuck that finger into an electrical socket. I couldn’t
move, but I could feel. I retreated, and the pain swept away.

That wasn’t my finger I felt. It was
everybody’s
finger.

I was in the network. That humming I heard, just
below the surface. That was the data, streaming by at the speed of light.
Tentatively, I dipped my mind into the river. It grasped me, yanking me in.

Stumbling, tumbling, falling, smashing against the
rocks of sensation. A rapids that ran in an ever-circle, cycling the length of
the Grinder all in a fraction of a fraction of a moment. Battered, I hung on
for dear sanity.

My senses overloaded. I could see, hear, smell,
and taste, all at once, all from different people, all at the same time. I
searched desperately for my own physical brain, my own body, but it was
nowhere, shut off to me. Still, I could feel the avatar of my mind being torn
apart in the torrent. I had no privacy over my own thoughts. I felt the
memories in my head leeching from me, being fed to every intact brain in the
network. Every circle I made in the circuit, I left more of myself behind. My
deepest, most secret hopes and fears and memories, spread out in the current
like red dye poured into a stream.

After a while, I got a handle on myself, and learned
how to mentally regulate the input into my mind. I found I could reach out to
others, read their individual memories and minds. I reached out, looking for
those I knew. Especially Nif. I couldn’t find her. She was separated, out of my
network. I couldn’t find Cece, either. But she was different. She was the first
to touch the Grinder. She was smack at its center, and I wasn’t expecting to
find her.

I did find others.

Melinda
Ortiz
.

Cece’s mom. Nif’s aunt. She was here. I remembered
how she received a call from one of Cece’s friends right after it happened, how
she drove toward the Grinder, how it picked her up by peeling the top off her
car. The entire lower half of her body was gone. I had stepped upon her small
intestine as I crawled through the interior conduits.

Paul Newman
.

Not the actor, of course. Officer Beefycakes. He
went by his middle name, Ossie, and his friends called him Oz. At least until
they’d heard about the nickname that the derby crowd had bestowed upon him.
They’d been calling him Beefycakes for a couple months now. He pretended to not
care, but it bothered him. He was gay. Married with three children, he’d never
cheated on his wife despite the almost crushing desire he had for other men. He
had two bullets in his left leg, and both his ankles were broken.

Yousef
Maldive
.

The man who’d driven the bulldozer at the Grinder,
only to miss. The Grinder had picked up his pet, a bulldog named Hannah
Montana. The dog had been his daughter’s, before she had died of leukemia two
years previous. It was all he had left of his daughter, after a fire destroyed
his home. All of Yousef’s ribs were broken, but otherwise, he was intact.
Hannah Montana had been tossed at a soldier and was lost.

Patrick
Underwood
.

The four-year-old boy who had shot his father in
the head. After falling from the office window, a group of animals dragged his
broken—but still alive—body back to the Grinder. He’d been originally
captured when the monster ran over his mother’s minivan, early on when the
Grinder was still new, even before it reached the stadium. It grabbed him by
the leg, but he came free after his ankle caught on the ripped roof of the van.
He had only been captured for a second, but it was enough for such a small body
to be taken over.

Uri, it turned out, wasn’t the boy’s biological
father. The plastic gun Patrick had clutched, the same plastic gun I still had
in my duffel bag, was the only present his real father had ever given him.
Patrick’s mom hadn’t thought the boy knew the truth about his real dad, but he
had.

Jordan
Wilson
.

The little girl with the peeled-back scalp, the
C-2 I had met when I was locked in with the others at the elementary school.
She was ten years old, a fifth-grader. She lived in Phoenix with her dad, who
escaped the Grinder, but was crushed and killed in the attack at the stadium. Jordan
had escaped the confinement at the school and rode back to the Grinder’s
embrace inside of the 18-wheeler I had seen after I had fled the school. That
same 18-wheeler, I learned, had been filled with the bugs used to attack the
school. Jordan wanted to be a singer when she grew up, and she practiced every
night in front of the mirror, for hours and hours on end.

Lance
Corporal Ted DiCisero
.

A marine from Fox Chase, Kentucky. I had known him
as the Beanstalk. After the attack on the school, he and several others fled
east in their Hummers, following falsely-planted orders to regroup. He’d felt
guilty about capturing me, of sticking me in that room. After the bugs
attacked, he’d assumed I was eaten alive.

Detached drones ambushed his convoy, and he was
overpowered and cuffed with his own set of zip cuffs, but only after he’d
killed five attackers. Ted had a pregnant girlfriend back home.
It was supposed to be a happy ending
, he
thought, over and over as he was dragged into the Grinder. His body still
clutched onto life, but was severely burned in the white phosphorous, and he
would die in a matter of minutes.

Faster and faster I learned, and soon I wasn’t
learning at all. I just already knew.

I learned how to visit any person or body I
wished, all except my own. I could see their minds, their memories, or, if I
wished, I could experience sensation through their bodies. Thousands upon
thousands of hopes and dreams, good people and bad, children, adults, men,
women. I knew them all.

The animals and bugs. I knew them, too. Even they
had thoughts, but in a way unlike anything you could imagine. I learned that bugs
yearned for food. And to mate. Some, like the ants and bees, felt this
unbelievable duty to protect those they loved. Yes, love. And those coyotes.
Fuck, coyotes felt fantastic pain when they were ripped from their families.

I recalled Clementine’s words about the Grinder’s human
calculators, so I tried it out. I attempted to multiply a couple large numbers.
It didn’t work.

I was different than the others. So many were
here, but I was all alone.

Their bodies were here. Their memories were here,
but like Clementine had suggested, their consciousness was turned off. They
remembered up until the moment they were ensnared, and that was it. If they
became detached and reunited, their memories of their separation were there,
but like with little Jordan Wilson, the new memories were foggy and uneven,
like a tape that had run through the VCR one too many times.

“Hello,” I yelled into the ether, hoping someone
would hear. My own voice echoed, as if I had called out into the abandoned
streets of a massive city. Nobody answered. I could sense them all, but it was
like they were sleeping, and no matter how much I yelled and prodded, they just
wouldn’t wake up. I was a ghost in the machine, without a body or brain to
haunt of my own, and I flitted from place to place.

I went back to the mind of the marine, Ted
DiCisero, hoping to find a way to communicate with him before he died. Earlier,
when I had been in the body of the person torn up by the A-10, I had ejected at
the moment of death, so I knew I didn’t have much time.

Hey
, I
said in his mind.
Are you there? Can you
hear me?
You felt bad for having to
arrest me. It’s okay. I forgive you. I know you were doing your job. I made it
out of there alive
.

He didn’t respond. I don’t know if he heard me, if
he knew I was there. Maybe it was for the best. His body was on the edge. I
allowed myself to feel just the smallest amount of his physical sensation. The
pain was incredible. Every nerve in his body screamed in agony.

I decided to wait with him, until the end. I
wouldn’t want to be alone if the positions were reversed.

I looked through his eyes, and we stared up into
the cloudy blue sky of a beautiful Tucson morning. The fog had finally cleared.

It’s okay
,
I said in his mind.
Let it go
.
My wife and I have this inside joke. We call
it Rule Number Two. We say it means “Don’t be afraid.” But what it really means
is that it’s okay to be scared. Just don’t let the fear take over, that’s all.
You’re not alone.

The light faded. I felt him slip away. His pain
ebbed, and even though I’d just met him hours earlier, I felt the extraordinary
weight of loss. I knew him better than anybody outside of the hive ever would.
He was my brother. We shared a connection unbearably strong.

I braced myself to be ejected from his mind and
tossed away.

Together, we watched the curtain fall.

Everything I thought I knew was wrong. I was just
beginning to realize that, but I hadn’t yet come to terms with it, or even
admitted it yet to myself.

What happened next cemented that notion.

Ted died as I watched through his eyes, and

I

Didn’t

Stop

Seeing.