The Grinding (5 page)

“Okay,” Randy said. “Blind, undying love. We can
see that.”

“Let’s figure this out,” Royce said.

Local radio didn’t work, but satellite radio did,
and the twins had it in their Jeep. We sat in their driveway, listening to news
reports, trying to come up with a plan. The national media had no idea what the
hell was going on. Tucson was the only place this was happening. They had the video
shots from the football game to analyze, but nobody on the radio could agree on
anything. The outside world had precious little contact with Tucson. Only a few
people with satellite phones and internet connections could communicate, and
rumors swirled.

Still, we learned a few things. The entire Tucson
airport and airfields at Davis Monthan were uprooted and unusable. The Grinder
was mostly spread out close to the ground, though it would occasionally rear up
like a cobra or tsunami. It was using dead bodies as highly-effective
ammunition against helicopters—the Tucson Police chopper was crashed and
smoldering on top of a Los Betos somewhere on the south side, and another
helicopter had crashed right into the side of “A” Mountain, setting the entire
hill on fire.

Despite the video from Arizona Stadium, nobody could
get past describing the monster as anything other than a giant, Godzilla-like
entity. They debated the origins of the creature.

They also talked of how to stop it. They played
clips from an earlier press conference, and the military-monotone voice said
flat out that they would never use a nuke as long as “The creature” remained in
a populated area. Other options were non-lethal chemical solutions. They
promised if they did use big ordnance, they’d warn us first, though I didn’t
know how they’d do that.

“They don’t know what to do,” Royce said.

“The radio and cell phone black-out is from them,”
Randy said while Royce nodded. They were in their element, talking military
tactics. “It’s S.O.P. They know they’re going to have to do something
unpopular. They don’t want burning babies shown live on CNN.”

“With all the satellites, they’ll never stop the
flow of information,” Royce said.

Randy grimaced. “But they can sure try.”

“They won’t nuke,” Royce said.

“They might if it takes off toward Phoenix,” Randy
said. “But they’ll try something smaller first. MOAB maybe.” His eyes widened.
“No. Willie Pete.”

“Willie Pete,” Royce repeated. “Of course. I bet
they try that first.” He looked at me. “Shit, man. You won’t want to be
anywhere near ground zero when they drop that. There’s no defense.”

“What’s that?”

“White phosphorus. It’s some seriously nasty
stuff. It’s napalm’s evil little brother. It not only kills you in a hundred
different ways, it digs you up after you’re dead and fucks your corpse and then
emails your mom to tell her about it. It’s that evil. It combusts at
80-something degrees. It’ll burn a hole right through you like the acid blood
in
Alien
. But it’s worse than that.
You get some on you, and it’s over. Even if you douse yourself with water, it
doesn’t come off easily because it sticks like wax. Once it dries, it just
turns back on, re-igniting off your body temp just to fuck with you. And if you
do manage to get it off, just a small amount in your bloodstream from a burn is
enough to poison and kill you anyway.”

“Just breathing it fucks you up,” Randy added. He
made an explosion noise. “It makes your lungs boil.”

“So, stay away from Willie Pete,” I said.

Royce nodded. “No truer words have been spoken.”

I sighed. “Guys. This isn’t helping.”

“If you want to save your wife,” Randy said, “we’ll
need to protect you from the creature. But, we also need to protect you from
the military.”

Royce nodded. “Kevlar and a gas mask will help.
But we need to know for sure how this monster captures people. My brother’s
jellyfish analogy may be correct, or he may be full of shit. Until we know, we can’t
keep you safe.”

“We need a biological sample—a body or a body
part that was attached so we can look at it under a scope.”

“We don’t have time for this, man,” I said. I
slipped out of the Jeep and paced on their driveway. Every minute that passed,
the chances of me getting Nif back grew slimmer and slimmer.

“We know somebody,” Randy said. “If anyone has
already figured this out, it’s her.”

“We promised her,” Royce said to his brother.

“Who?” I asked. “Promised her what?”

“Clementine,” Randy said.

Royce groaned. “She’ll kick our ass if we show up
at her house. Adam, you met her the other day. She was the girl from the
Halloween party.”

“Which girl?” Nif and I and the twins had attended
the Halloween party at the university. Nif didn’t have that great of a time
because she didn’t know anybody there, so we left early. I had dressed as a
dog, and she went as a cheerleader holding a giant jar of peanut butter. Only a
few people had gotten the joke, which had pissed off the already-grumpy Nif
even more. The twins had worn normal clothes, but Royce decked out in makeup
and a wig to make his head look fake. They spent the evening before the party
walking around campus freaking people out when Royce would move and talk.

“Clementine was the badger.”

I remembered her. She was drunk on the couch
making out with a gladiator. She had a thick, southern accent. “How is she
going to help?”

“Let’s go,” Randy said. “We gotta grab some stuff
from the house, but we’ll explain on the way.” They shoved the Al Capone
shotgun in my hands. The gun was heavy and didn’t feel natural. I’d shot
handguns when I was much younger. I’d never held anything like this.

As I held the gun, I worried about something that
had been bothering me a lot, especially in the past hour.

I was a pussy, and I knew it.

I used to watch all those war movies, like
Hamburger Hill, Platoon, Saving Private
Ryan,
shit, even the sci-fi ones like
Starship
Troopers,
and it always terrified me. I tried to put myself in that
situation. I always wondered how I’d react when the shit started to fly. I knew
the answer.

I was afraid my fight or flight instinct was
broken. All I had was the flight part.

Once, before we got married, Nif and I were at a
Lucky Wishbone waiting at the picnic table outside for our food. This
scraggly-looking homeless dude and his wife or girlfriend came up and sat at
the table next to us.

“Give us some money,” the guy said. He said it to
Nif. “We’re hungry.”

“Get a job, shit bucket,” Nif said.

I could be a real jerk sometimes, but when it came
to confrontations with absolute strangers, I preferred avoidance. Nif, on the
other hand, liked to light every fuse she came across.

Small and meek at first glance, her abrasive,
aggressive manner caught people by surprise. They backed the fuck down right
away.

But not always.

The guy went crazy. He jumped up on the bench and
ripped off his jacket, revealing a frame so emaciated and frail that a strong
sneeze could be fatal. He pounded his chest like a goddamned gorilla, and he
let out an incoherent, screaming stream of expletives right in my girlfriend’s
direction.

Nif laughed.

The guy’s companion tried to get him off the
bench. He pulled away, and for a moment, I thought he was going to haul off and
punch Nif right in the face.

I froze.

I knew I should do something,
anything
. But I didn’t know what. At the very least, even the most
timid of men would put themselves between the crazy and his girl. But I did
nothing. I sat there, useless, and I allowed my girlfriend to do all the work.

“Come on,” the guy’s girlfriend said, finally
pulling him off the table. She dragged him away as he continued to scream at Nif.
He left his jacket on the table.

Nif picked it up and taunted him as they left.
“You left your coat, you fucking bum! You’re going to freeze to death tonight,
you worthless pile of vomit. I’m going to find your corpse in the morning and
piss right in your dead fucking face! You hear me?”

After he was gone, Nif looked and me and laughed.
“What an asshole,” she said.

She never noticed or said anything about my lack
of reaction. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I was a coward, and I knew it. I could pretend,
lie to myself all I wanted, but the truth was the truth. There was no fixing
it. As much as I wanted to save Nif, as much as I was willing to die in order
to save my wife, that nagging little voice in the back of my head wouldn’t go
away:

You don’t
have the balls to make the sacrifice. Not when it matters.

“I still wish it were zombies,” Royce said as they
emerged from the house a minute later, holding two black duffel bags. We
abandoned Scooter’s truck and went into their Jeep because they had the radio.
I sat in the back while they took up the front of the modified cab. They had me
continue to hold the gun. Randy did all of the driving from his vantage on the
left side, though they both held the wheel. I’m not sure how they managed to
drive, but a whole episode of their TV show explained it.

I eyed the bags. “What’s that?”

Randy said, “Our zombie survival gear. Loads of
cool stuff.”

Royce continued to grumble. “Damn
kaiju
. A monster finally attacks, and
it’s the one type we’re not prepared for. At least it’s not vampires. I don’t
think I’d be able to handle that.”

“He hates ‘em,” Randy said. “Werewolves, too.”

“That’s not true. Werewolves are cool.”

“Since when?”

The brothers continued to bicker as we pulled out
of their neighborhood and turned onto Benson Highway, heading southwest. The
smoky night sky had fewer lights than before, but the loud, sonic boom of
fighter jets punctuated the air. It seemed the Grinder had finished rampaging
around the south side and now zeroed in toward the more affluent, northern side
of town.

I wondered if it had a plan, if it was
deliberately attacking specific areas, or if it was like a child at a
playground, running around from place to place, just collecting people.

And, after all this time, I allowed myself to ask
the question.

Why
?

What the hell was going on? How could this happen?
Where did it come from? Scooter said he’d seen the thing on the floor. That it
looked like a spilled milkshake. But how did it get there? Was it a science
experiment gone bad? Was it man-made? Was there a purpose to it, other than
being scary as shit? The twins believed it was of alien origin, but I wasn’t so
sure. It seemed like an odd, elaborate way to kill us. If they had the power to
create such a thing, surely they had the means to drop an alien nuke on us. And
why here? Why now?

The only thing I was certain of was that this
wasn’t a mistake of evolution or a nuclear-waste mutation or anything natural.
This was a deliberate, I’m-going-to-fuck-your-shit-up creation made by someone
or something who really, really wanted us dead.

It scared me, almost as much as losing Nif. It
scared me that I might die and never know the truth.

A few moving cars cluttered the road, though it was
mostly abandoned ones that clogged the streets. People had fled, or they were
hunkered down in their homes. The radio had nothing new to report, just a rehash
of the same crap theories about the monster’s origin and how the military, the
police, the government, whoever, were going to respond. Several callers chimed
in and said they should nuke it now, before it was too late. “It’s just
Tucson.”

“Yeah, fuck you too,” I muttered as we picked our
way.

Royce changed to a heavy metal station, and Iron
Maiden’s “The Trooper” blared. I hadn’t heard that song in years. I used to
listen to it to get revved up before a track meet. The twins, a bunch of other
guys, and I had road tripped to an Iron Maiden concert our senior year of high
school, but that was before I got more into punk.

I asked about this Clementine woman so they’d turn
down the music. It made me even more nervous and jumpy, and I wasn’t sure why.

“She’s a doctor,” Royce said. “Not a real a
doctor, but an animal one. She’s a veterinary parasitologist. She studies
parasites in animals. She also has a Master’s in chemistry. We worked with her
while we were still attached to the university’s teat.”

“Why do you think she’s got answers?”

Royce grinned. “For one thing, she’s batshit
crazy. And I’m not just saying that, either. She’s obsessed with cryptozoology.
Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, fucking Chupacabre, you know, bullshit like that.
She wears some freaky headgear when she sleeps so alien brainwaves can’t get to
her. I’m not joking. But she’s also smart. She gets published all the time.”

Randy coughed. “Well, she used to get published
all the time. Then she submitted something about lizard people, and that was
the end of that. Now she deworms puppies out of the back of a van.”

“Great,” I said, not feeling confident at all. “It
sounds like she’s just what we need.”

“Adam,” Randy said. “Trust me on this. If anybody
in town has the biology of this thing figured out, it’s her. Hell, I wouldn’t
be surprised if she’s the one who made it.”

Royce nodded. “I hadn’t thought about that. She
already has the evil lair thing going on. Though it doesn’t seem her style to
make a man-eating, destroy-the-world monster.”

“And you think she’ll just be hanging around at
her house?”

“Yes,” they said.

We traveled west on Broadway, past the Park Place
Mall and all the big box stores around it. The Grinder hadn’t crashed through
here, but the Red Lobster up ahead was on fire. Across the street, hordes of
people looted through the shattered opening of the Best Buy. According to the Jeep’s
clock, it was almost midnight.
Christ
.
It’d seemed like hours and hours had passed, but if it was a regular day, Nif
and I would just be getting home after stopping at The Nomery for dinner.

“Ah man,” Royce said, looking out the window as a
group of men loaded the back of their truck with several giant flat screen TV
boxes.

“We’re not thieves,” said Randy.

The traffic jammed the street, and we crossed the
median at the intersection and continued west driving on the wrong side of the
road.

I looked nervously at the sky. The lights were
getting closer and closer.

“Where, exactly, are we headed?”

“You know that weird silo thing near downtown?”
Randy said. “We showed it to you a couple months ago when we met up at Club
Congress.”

“Yeah,” I said. The building sat in the warehouse
district. They had pointed it out, told me some super-secret stuff went on it
there, but they were falling down drunk at the time, and I hadn’t paid much
attention. They’d also told me that night that they believed their father
planned on assassinating the president of Argentina.

“That’s her place.”

“She lives
downtown
?”
I looked at the circle of helicopters. At the rate we were moving, we’d
converge with them right when we got there. “Guys…”

“We know, we know…” Randy said as he rolled onto
the sidewalk to go around a pair of crashed cars. “It’s going to be a bit of a
rescue mission, too.”

“Fuck,” I said, pounding the headrest.

Randy grunted. “Give us a break. She
is
the mother of our unborn baby, you
know.”

“
What?
”

Royce turned the volume back up, blasting Slayer’s
“South of Heaven.”

As I sat there and tried to wrap my mind around
what they’d just said, trying to figure out if their revelation would help or
hurt my current dilemma of trying to save Nif, I had the weirdest sense of
déjà vu
.

Surely that’s happened to you. Sometimes it’s
triggered by a song, or a smell, or the passing of a stranger with a familiar
look. It rears up out of nowhere, and it doesn’t seem connected to the
triggering event except in the most remote, intangible way.

In this case, I think it was the song combined
with the sudden realization that the twins could have a sex life. They always
joked about it, but I never thought it would happen for them. Girls came up to
them all the time at the clubs, but they would always chicken out at the last
minute.

Anyway, I thought of her. Not Nif. My first
girlfriend.

Samantha. Crazy, beautiful Samantha.

She saw me as a project, when we first met my
sophomore year. I’d joined the chess club—the Rooks—to fill the
after-school time between cross country ending in the fall and track starting
in the spring. Back then my family and I had just moved to Tucson, and my dad
didn’t have a steady job. I hated coming home after school to find him sitting
on the couch, staring into nothing like one of those Easter Island heads,
watching TV while my mom worked cleaning hotel rooms. She’d come home dead
tired, but would clean the house and cook us dinner every night.

Samantha was only one of two girls on the whole
chess squad, the other being Pandora Miller, and I’m only 80% sure that girl
wasn’t a dude.

Samantha was a whole year older, and everything
about her fascinated me. She and I were paired together, and we got along
pretty well. She had red hair, which is like kryptonite to nerds like myself,
and her pale blue eyes bore a hole in you while she waited for you to make your
next move on the chessboard. She had braces with different colored bands every
time I saw her, and I used to go out of my way to make her smile so I could see
what color she had that day.

Her favorite band was Slayer.

Playing chess, somehow she always knew where you
were going to move. Four or five moves into a match, and she had you cornered.
Once she even beat me in four moves. I never beat her. Nobody ever beat her.

She acted like that in real life, too: smart,
manipulative, driven. That summer between 10th and 11th grades we ended up
talking on the phone all the time, and I always had the sense that our
conversations were orchestrated dances where I had no real control. This was
another chess game to her, only this time I didn’t even bother to move the
pieces myself.

She would pick me up in her red Nissan, and we’d hang
out at the mall. I’d always get that look. Why is
she
hanging out with
him
?
I didn’t have much of a style back then. I hadn’t many friends yet. I wandered
from activity to activity, seeing if I could find something that would stick. I
was a faceless, personality-less schoolboy drone. I didn’t have tadpoles or a
forest to explore that summer, and I had no idea what to do with myself.

A clean slate, I was. One that Samantha could
paint in her ideal image. She didn’t even hide the fact that’s what she was
doing to me, and I didn’t care. She decided she liked me in black concert
shirts featuring old-school metal bands. And I wore them. I didn’t mind. And
once I was introduced to the music, I decided I liked it anyway.

The only thing I could beat her at was solving
Rubik’s Cubes. It drove her crazy. She’d sulk when I pulled a cube out to
fiddle with it. I once saw in her room that she had borrowed a book from the
library on how to speedcube. She never admitted it though. And I never called
her on it. I guessed she never got any better than me. If she had, she would’ve
happily demonstrated it.

We started to date once school started up again,
and we started having sex right away. I was a virgin, and after that first
time, I told her she was my first. She laughed at me. Of course she knew. I
asked her if it was hers, and she said yes, but I didn’t believe her.

We did it every day. Sometimes before school,
almost always after school, and often during lunch in her car. This wasn’t your
average, awkward and uncomfortable elbows and knees teenager sex, either. This
was wild howler monkey sex, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Sometimes
I’d need days to recover, only she didn’t give me days. I’d come home covered
in bruises and scrapes from the different ways and positions she always
insisted on trying. I told my dad I was on the wrestling team.

One day, we broke up. Just like that. She went on
a vacation over the weekend with her family, and when she got back, she drove
me up to the top of Mount Lemmon and told me she didn’t want to see me anymore.
When I asked her why, she said she’d gotten bored with me. She said I was like
a cool, independent band that stopped being everything that made them
worthwhile the moment they got recognition for what they were doing.

I never understood what she meant. I still don’t
understand what she meant.

Despite my protestations, we broke up, and that
was that. She ceased to acknowledge I ever existed, and since I wasn’t on the
chess squad anymore, she never had to look at me with those laser eyes. It was
okay, though. I didn’t love her, and even though I was upset at first, I got
over it.

Afterwards, though, things changed for me at
school. Once you date a hot girl, even an enigma like Samantha, your standing
in the school food chain changes. You’ve earned your wings. People see you.
They talk to you. They want to be your friend.

I didn’t take advantage of it. I became ingrained
in that strange, pseudo-clique the exists somewhere between the all-out nerds
and the long-haired, go-nowhere metal fans who liked to fix cars and everyone
joked would end up in trailer parks.

Samantha went to prom with some guy named Bruce
who danced ballet. Bruce is now an openly-homosexual weatherman in New Jersey.
Samantha moved to California and, last I heard, was in prison for trafficking
cocaine.

But anyway, the idea that the twins could father a
baby surprised me. It made me look at them in a different way. I felt kind of
sick to my stomach thinking about it, though I feel bad for admitting that.

Boom!
A
missile shot from an unseen aircraft exploded 500 meters in front of us, and,
again, to our left in a neighborhood. A red cloud filled the night. The burst
was so loud, it slapped me in the chest, and I almost blew a hole in the roof
of the Jeep with the shotgun clutched in my hand.

“AGM-65 is my guess,” Royce said after a moment.
“A-10 or F-16.”

“They ain’t fucking around anymore,” Randy said.
“We might be too late.”

The sound filled my ears with an angry hornet buzz
for a few seconds. I still couldn’t see any sign of the Grinder, and I wondered
if the bombing was an accident.

The Jeep screeched to a halt, and I realized very
quickly, fuck no, it was no accident. And that bomb was probably dropped in an
attempt to save our asses, because out of nowhere—

It appeared.

It seeped into the street, a gelatinous parade of
the dead, the dying, and the captured. Stucco houses crumbled like dried-up
peanut butter cookies as the ten-foot-high amalgam of people, metal, debris,
and I-don’t-know-what-else oozed onto the street a couple blocks in front of
us.

And, it had changed.