The Grinding (7 page)

I didn’t want to shoot because I didn’t want to
fall over again, plus these were people. Real, live people, fucked in the head
maybe, but they were still living humans who didn’t know what they were doing.

But most of all, I was afraid.

A deep memory seeped up in me like hairy sewage
from a drain. A memory, and a feeling, the same feeling I’d had that day when I
froze while Nif stood her ground against the homeless guy.

The memory was of my father’s voice, and the first
time I fired a gun:
Don’t be a pussy,
Adam. If you’re afraid of your own weapon, how are you going to feel when
somebody has one, too?
He’d jammed his grease-encrusted finger at the paper
target of an angry-looking man pointing a gun at me
. Now fire, goddamnit
.

So I fired, goddamnit. I fired then, and I fired
now. I pulled the trigger and fired. And fired. It was an automatic shotgun,
after all. It nearly danced out of my grip, but I ran and I yelled and I fired,
and I didn’t fall. The whole thing emptied in what seemed like two seconds
flat.

But holy shit, man. Holy. Shit.

It did its job.

I didn’t have time to think about what I’d just
done, but I did anyway. I’d just turned ten people into beef jerky.

They weren’t
real people
, I told myself.
They want
to kill me
.
This is self-defense
.
My chest hurt.

We scrambled past the sidewalk and up a steep set
of stairs into the covered courtyard surrounded by concrete-laden commercial
buildings. Our footsteps echoed as we ran past the silent fountain and out the
backside, right into the middle level of a three-level parking garage.

I’d been here once, back when Nif and I had first
started dating. We’d come here at three AM so she could show me some moves on
her skateboard. We’d been chased away by the security guard. I wondered if he
was still here somewhere. Nif wanted to find his car and slash his tires, and I
talked her out of it. We compromised by dumping a giant slushy from Circle K on
the hood of the only other car we could see. We didn’t even know if it was his
car. I felt terrible afterward.

“Wait,” Randy said, falling over themselves, both
of them wheezing. “We gotta rest, man.” Royce let the duffel bag clatter off
his neck and onto the ground, and Randy did the same.

It took them a minute, but Royce unzipped the bag
and pulled out a black, round canister. It was a drum magazine for my shotgun.
Between gasps, he walked me through changing it out.

As I fumbled with the gun, the distinctive whoosh
of a missile streaked above. The explosion shook the ground, and dust cascaded
off the ceiling, causing the twins to cough.

“Adam!” came a loud male voice, coming from behind
us. The voice echoed like knives. It came from the courtyard by the fountain.
“Come back!”

“We’ll keep you safe,” another voice called.
“She’s here. She’s waiting for you. We can protect you.”

“Holy shit,” Royce said, looking up at me between
wheezes and coughs.

I felt it again, that ache at my chest. Or was it
a tug… It still wasn’t strong enough to overthrow my sense, but it was there,
tempting. I realized that this was something with real power. I was afraid to
ask the twins if they felt it, too.

“Who? What the hell…?” Randy said. “How does it
know you?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “But we gotta keep
moving.”

The voices continued to call my name. They never
came in the garage, but they were out there, calling. Maybe they feared our
weapons. Not that our piddly guns were real defense. At any moment, the whole
of the Grinder would crash through the buildings behind us, and drop the garage
ceiling right on our heads.

We had to move. The twins stood, and I took one of
the duffel bags,
damn
, it was heavy.
They grabbed the other, and we continued toward the exit, a set of stairs
hopefully leading to the first level and to the courtyard or somewhere outside.

A loud crash, and the sound of ripping and
exploding metal came from every direction at once. We half tumbled, half ran
down the stairs, and I didn’t dare look back.

We stumbled from the first level and back out into
the night. Heat washed over me from behind, and we ran across the gravel and
toward the street. I hazarded a look over my shoulder. The entire top level of
the parking garage burned, and beyond it, the Grinder towered several hundred
feet into the air, having come together like a massive snake ready to strike.

I saw the cause of the explosion. A military jet
had crashed into the garage, its uprooted tail piercing up through the flames
on the top floor.

Several missiles streaked through the sky, aimed
at the center mass of the Grinder, but the monster twisted and split just as
they were about to impact. They blasted through the hole it had made in itself
and detonated in the distance.

I tripped hard over a curb and skidded across the
sidewalk into mud. I stood and waited for the twins to catch up.

A low, deep, dinosaur-like bellow filled the night
sky as an A-10’s cannon strafed the monster. The rumble came from the plane’s
cannon, spinning at an incredible speed. I could feel it in my chest. The deep
roar came again as another A-10 whipped by.

The whole top half of the Grinder had transformed
into ten or more massive tentacles, waving in the air like a hydra or a
colossal squid. It tossed a handful of people into the night, and a low-flying
A-10 tried to swerve to miss them, but one of its back engines exploded, and
the plane twisted away, leaving a corkscrew of smoke in the night sky. It
crashed out of sight.

I felt sick to my stomach. I couldn’t stop
thinking about the people I had shot.

A minivan pulled up on the street about a block
away. It screeched to a stop, blocked by a fallen utility pole. A woman jumped
out. She screamed something in the direction of the beast and ran out of sight,
over the fallen pole and up the road toward Broadway, and the monster.

“Her van,” Randy wheezed. The twins sat on the
sidewalk, their arms wrapped around themselves. They didn’t look too good.

“Do you guys have an inhaler or something?” I’d
never seen them like this. I was concerned, yeah, but also wondering if I’d
have to carry them. If I even could.

“Don’t worry about us,” Randy wheezed. “Get that
van.”

“Okay. Let’s go,” I said. But the two wouldn’t
stand.

“Get it, and bring it back,” Royce said. “We’ll be
okay. Go!”

I hesitated, then ran.

As I raced toward the vehicle, the Grinder continued
to fight with the airplanes. It remained in its massively-tall hydra shape,
battling amongst the roar of the jets and the rat-a-tat machine-gun fire coming
from multiple directions.

It was obvious the military’s response was doing
more harm than good, and pretty soon they’d have to kick it up a notch.

The van was in rough shape. The roof had been
peeled off, and the back seat was missing, like it had been lifted out. I
guessed that’s what had happened, that the woman’s children or family had been
taken.

Maybe she’d felt it, too. Maybe for her, the pull
of the Grinder was just too much.

But right then, I didn’t care. I tossed in the
duffel bag and shotgun and jumped in through the open driver’s door, relieved
to see the van’s key in the ignition. The front airbags had deployed and been
pulled away. Attached to the end of the keychain was a small plastic frame
holding the image of a fat, happy baby, smiling at the camera, surrounded by
teddy bears. I stared at the picture.

I looked out the window for the mom. I didn’t see
her anywhere. If she was out there, she was either caught up by the Grinder or
blown to kibble by the bombs. I turned the key, and half the lights on the dash
remained lit up, but it started. I backed up and turned down the side street
toward Royce and Randy.

I turned just in time to see my friends unload
their machine gun into a small crowd of drones. Half the crowd hit the ground,
but the remainder, all wielding baseball bats and other
blunt-force-trauma-inducing weapons, advanced warily on the twins.

Oh fuck
.

The twins tossed their machine gun, and they
pulled up a single handgun and began to pop off shot after shot into the crowd.

I gunned it. I aimed straight for the center mass
of drones.

Too late. Several of them stepped out of the way
and onto the sidewalk. They jumped the twins and rained blows down on them with
their baseball bats and metal clubs. Out of bullets, out of breath, all they
could do was hold up their hands.

I crashed into one straggler who bounced off the
hood and crumpled on the street. I ran over a couple more who had been gunned
down by the twins. The van lurched and crunched, and an ominous whirring noise
emanated from the engine. I grabbed the shotgun and jumped out.

“Stop!” I yelled. Five of them were left. Four men.
One woman. They were all around my age except for one of the men, who was in
his fifties.

To my surprise, the five did stop, and they looked
at me. For the briefest moment, I thought maybe there was a mistake. Like these
were normal people, and they thought the twins were part of the monster, on
account of how they looked.

“Adam,” the older man said. “Please don’t harm us.
All we want is for you to come with us. To come to her. She is waiting. She’s
calling to you right now.”

Behind, a jet screamed through the air, but the
sound of gunfire had stopped. I felt the shadow of the Grinder behind me, just
on the other side of the buildings. I didn’t dare turn around, to take my eyes
off of these guys.

“Just go away,” I yelled. Shit, I was scared. But
I wasn’t going to back down. Royce and Randy were lying on the ground in a
puddle of blood. Both of their arms were broken and bent in impossible angles.
Royce’s eyes were closed, but Randy blinked up at me, the pain evident in his
eyes.

“Please, Adam. We don’t want you hurt,” the man
said. “But we will drag you back if we have to. It’s for your own good. It’s
not safe out here.”

“Behind you,” Randy gasped.

I turned to see a second group of thirty or more
men coming down the stairs from the parking garage. More came from the street
where I had picked up the van. Beyond, the Grinder was gone, which meant it had
reformed into its low-to-the ground shape.

The majority of the men coming down the stairs
were police officers, or wore the tattered remains of uniforms. Several wielded
handguns. They came casually, not fast but not slow, like infantry marching in
front of a tank.

I started shooting.

I started with the five in front of me. Three
quick blasts, and they all hit the ground. Again, I felt sick, but I didn’t
know what else to do.

“Sorry,” I muttered to the older guy as I ran
around the van. I opened up the sliding door on the side, and the whole door
fell off the track, clattering to the ground, its wires still attached to the
van. I fired a few times toward the drone police officers. I dropped the
shotgun in the van and half pulled, half threw the twins into the back. Randy
cried out in pain as I pulled on their broken arm. I don’t know if it was the
adrenaline or what, but they felt way lighter than I expected. I picked up the
second duffel bag and raced back to the door just as the drones started to
shoot back.

I dove in and wrenched the transmission into drive
and floored it, heading west down the road, parallel with the still-burning
parking garage. The passenger-side sliding door dragged on the ground as we
drove, and the van pulled hard to the right.

Bullets slammed into the side of the van. The window
over the other sliding door shattered, and I felt both of the tires on the
driver’s side go flat. Suddenly, it drove like a brick in a field of taffy. I
turned north on a side street and limped it as far as I could. The engine
screamed in protest. Just as we approached 5th street, the engine coughed and
died. We coasted to a stop.

I’d put a half mile between us and the Grinder. I
could no longer see where it was. A hundred fires gave the night sky a red hue.

Randy coughed, and it sounded weak and pitiful.

I jumped in the back. Randy and Royce lay where
the back seat had been ripped away. The entire floor of the van was soaked in
blood and glass. Randy moved as if to reach for me, but he stopped and grimaced
in pain. Tears streamed down his cheek.

Then he said it.

“He’s gone.”

He gasped the words wetly. “Oh God, I can’t feel him
anymore.” Then he whispered, gurgling, “Royce…no…”

Royce was dead. It took a long time for my brain
to wrap around it. Royce. Dead.

My friend.

Gone. Just like that. Gone.

This is my
fault. If I hadn’t come to their house
…

“Don’t move,” I said. “I’m going to find another
car. I’ll take you to a hospital.”

“Adam.” He coughed, and blood came from his mouth.
“There’s something I gotta confess. Royce thought we shouldn’t tell you, but I
think you need to know. It’s about Nif.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“She’d been coming over a lot lately, while you
were at work. You know, just to hang out, smoke some weed. Just innocent stuff.
But she was always asking us about being twins. Like if we could feel each
other’s minds, weird shit like that. It didn’t make any sense until she told us
about her dreams. And about your and Nif’s twins.”

I didn’t say anything, too surprised to react.
Other than me and the shrinks, I hadn’t thought Nif had told anybody about her
abortion or the nightmares. Royce and Randy? I didn’t even think she liked them.

“Save your strength,” I said. “This isn’t
important.”

“No. It is,” Randy said. “She came by that night
last March, you know, before it happened. She was really upset.”

She did
what?
“Wait… She went to your house
that
night
?”

“Yeah. She…she told us she was going to leave you.
She was bawling hard. We didn’t know what to do. She loves you, man. She said so,
and she meant it. But… I don’t know. She said she just couldn’t take being with
you anymore. She didn’t elaborate. We thought she meant she was going to, you
know, leave. It wasn’t until a couple days later that we heard about what had
happened.”

I sat there stunned. Nif had wanted to leave me?
Back in rehab, she had said all sorts of stuff like that, but this was just eight
months ago. I had thought all of that was behind us.

Randy continued, grappling with the words.
“Anyway, are you sure you want to do this? You can’t save her. You can try, but…you’re
going to get yourself killed.”

“But I have to try,” I whispered. “I…she called
me. She begged for my help.”

Randy nodded. He coughed, grimacing with pain.
More blood came from his mouth.

It was killing me just looking at him, doing
nothing. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital,” I said. “I’ll find another car. Don’t
worry. You’ll be okay.”

“No,” he hissed, and I could barely hear him.
“He’s gone. He’s part of me, don’t you understand? I have to go, too.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It won’t be long. I can feel it. It won’t be
long.”

I put my hand on my friend’s chest, and it felt as
if I crunched down on a bag of potato chips. My friends were dead and dying. Nif
had wanted away from me. All the emotion of the last ten minutes welled up in me
and came out like a fire hydrant that had been creamed by a bus.

I sobbed.

Randy closed his eyes, then he coughed. “Find
Clementine. Find her, tell her we sent you. She’ll help you, but you gotta help
her, too. She won’t want to leave. Make her. Please. Make sure you give her the
duffel bag, too. The one you carried, not the other one. Tell her we said
goodbye.”

“You can tell her yourself,” I said.

But he couldn’t. He was gone.

I didn’t have the stamina to carry both duffel
bags far. I put the bag for Clementine over my shoulder and unzipped the other.
It contained several magazines for the now-gone machine gun and another
canister for my shotgun, along with a couple more boxes of shells. It also
contained a bullet-proof vest. I put it on. It was heavy, like the lead apron for
when you get an x-ray. I imagined I looked ridiculous, like one of those guys
you see all dressed up at comic book conventions, someone who would never be
confused for an actual, real-life commando.

I reloaded my shotgun and dumped the extra shells
in the other bag. Inside it, there was a gas mask with replacement filters, and
another, smaller bag sealed with a zip tie. There was also a note that read,
“Clementine.”

I opened the glove compartment of the van, and I
found a pen and a small pad of paper. I wrote a note and left it on the dash.

To whomever
finds this note:

The Grinder
took the woman who owns this van. I think her baby may have been taken, too.
The body in the back are Royce and Randy Dominguez. They were my friends.
Please treat them with respect.

I didn’t sign it.

I tried to push the van to the side of the road,
but I couldn’t move it. I hoped after all of this was over, someone would find
the note and then seek out the twin’s parents and tell them that their sons
were dead. I doubted I’d have the chance.

I stepped into the street, bag over my shoulder,
shotgun in my hands, and I jogged west, angling toward downtown.

One benefit of this strange, unnatural attraction
I now had with the Grinder was that I could sense where it was relative to my
position. It had changed direction, rolling east, which was away from where I
needed to go. The further away it got, the less I could feel.

I wondered about the Grinder’s foot soldiers.
Before, like at the roller derby, one had to touch the beast to remain under
its control. This new thing with the drones…this mind control…how did that work?
Did they have to be close to it? Or would the control work wherever and
whenever?

I put my questions on pause, and concentrated on
my route. I would first have to pass where I was earlier…Arizona Stadium. It
loomed in the distance, its visage forever burned in my mind now as a giant
tombstone. The road was jammed with discarded cars, all packed in so tightly
they were useless to me. I remembered the woman who had abandoned her minivan
in the street. I wondered how many of the people in these cars had run away,
and how many had chased after the monster. I sometimes saw cars moving on the
side streets or a pair of candle-lit eyes watching me suspiciously through
curtains. But the roads were barren of people.

As I jogged, I thought about everything that had
just happened. It still didn’t seem real. Nif had been captured. My best
friends were gone. I had killed people. Several people. When I had woken up
this morning, my biggest concern was finding the one type of ferret food that
Hamlet wouldn’t yak all over the living room floor.

Nothing would be the same after this. No matter
what happened. Nothing. And that freaked me out. Even if by some miracle I
saved Nif, I knew she’d be destroyed mentally. She was already fragile, like one
of those museum paintings that are so close to falling apart, they’re behind
glass and you can’t even take a picture of them.

All this pain and sacrifice. It couldn’t be for
nothing. I refused to believe it. After all our difficulties, after the drugs,
after the long road to rehab.

After that night last March when she tried to kill
herself.

Something had to come from it. Something.

Nif was always looking for meaning, for purpose,
for something bigger than herself. It’s how she was. For that year after her
graduation from rehab, she spent her time looking for answers.

For the most part I’d considered myself agnostic.
If there was a God, I figured he probably wasn’t anything like we imagined. Or
we were like a forgotten toy buried somewhere in his closet. It wasn’t one of
those things that kept me up at night, but when I did think about it, I always remembered
the old lady and the tadpoles.
The Lord
doesn’t care about the beasts of this world
, she had said, meaning the
animals and bugs and the sort. But I reckoned it applied to us, too. It was the
only explanation that made sense to me.

Nif was an atheist when we met. But after her
stint in rehab, after all those crazy nightmares pounded on her night after
night, she began to question that lack of faith. She believed the dreams to be
real. She believed her twins—
our
twins—burned in hell. It tore her up. She set out to find answers. To
find solace. She found neither.

She tried every faith imaginable. She talked to
priests and rabbis. She went to the Baptist church down the street from our
house. She read up on Scientology. Islam. Buddhism. Hinduism. Other religions I
never even heard of. None of it felt right to her.

“I’m doing something wrong,” she told me one
night, about a month before it happened. “It shouldn’t be so hard.”

I didn’t know how to respond. So I said nothing.

She continued. “Do you ever get scared, when
you’re walking?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know…do you worry that when you take your
next step, the ground won’t really be there? Like it had been an illusion all
along, and you’ve just been falling and falling and dreaming, and you’re
getting closer to the bottom of the pit every moment. And maybe, at the very
bottom of the pit, there’s a hungry blender, waiting for you.”

She’d been saying weird shit like this a lot
lately. I’d been just doing the smile-and-nod thing, but it was starting to
frustrate me, and I didn’t know what to do or say.

“No,” I said. “I’ve never felt that way.”

She looked at me with those impossible brown eyes.
“Why not?”

“Because when I take steps, I can usually see
where the ground will be.”

“That’s what I want,” she said. “I want to feel
that.”

A couple weeks later, I came home from work, and I
found her in the bathtub with her wrists slit.

I walked into the house, I put my stuff down, and
I could just feel it hanging dense in the air.
Something’s wrong
. Hamlet emerged from underneath the couch,
looking sheepish. Nif rarely let him roam free by himself, otherwise he’d yank
all the lamps off the tables and chew on the cable wire for the TV.

People who say they’ve seen ghosts sometimes
relate a feeling of cold, negative energy when they walk over a haunted patch.
I never believed in any of that stuff, but that’s exactly what I felt when I
entered the house.

“Nif?”

The ferret hopped into the living room, ran in a
few circles, and then headed down the hallway. He scratched at the door to the
bathroom.

I tried to open it, but it was locked.

“Nif?” I called again. She didn’t answer.

I think my subconscious knew what was going on
before I did. That
oh shit
tingly
feeling of panic washed over me. It wasn’t unusual for me to come home and find
Nif gone. It wasn’t unusual for the bathroom door to be locked because the lock
was a pain and often locked itself on your way out. But still, I knew something
was…
off
. I grabbed a butter knife
from the kitchen and unlocked the door.

Nif looked up at me from the bathtub. She moved
languidly, naked and bathed in crimson.

“This is taking longer than I thought,” she said.

Hours later, while I sat in the hospital lobby, a
woman in a buttoned-up pant suit—a social worker, cop, I didn’t even
know—came out to talk to me. She introduced herself, but I didn’t hear
her. I was still in shock. I couldn’t stop wondering what I had done wrong.

Nif had told me all about this blender she was
about to fall into, and I still hadn’t been able to catch her.

“She’ll be okay,” the woman said. “Physically, at
least. But she still isn’t talking. Can you tell us what might have driven her
to do this to herself?”

I looked up. “I don’t know,” I said. And I didn’t.
I told her about the dreams, about the search for meaning through all the
churches. But it still made no sense to me. I was so confused.

Nif spent a month in a mental hospital. I’d visit
her whenever I could, and she acted normal, the same as before she’d tried to
kill herself. Her new shrink, a bearded guy named Dr. Metcalf, had advised me
not to ask her about it, so I didn’t. But I couldn’t stop wondering about what
I had done wrong, what I could’ve done.

So, one day I decided the doctor’s advice was
bullshit, and I asked her flat out.

“What can I do?” I asked. “Tell me how I can fix
it.”

She looked up at me and frowned.

“I’m not your Rubik’s Cube,” she said.

And nothing more.

She came home a few days later, and we picked up
where we left off. I didn’t ask her again. She didn’t bring it up. Cece and our
other friends would come over, and we’d sit and laugh and play video games, and
we’d all ignore the scars on Nif’s wrists.

A month later, she told me she found a church.
She’d met a girl in the hospital, and they’d kept contact on the outside. They
met for lunch a few times, and things spiraled after that.

The Lambs of Redemption. I thought it sounded more
like a metal band than a church. Nif said she went to a service, and something
just clicked in her mind, like a light switch being thrown. She asked me to go
with her. I didn’t want to, but I wanted to make her happy. So I went.

This wasn’t an incense and robes and
stained-glass-window church. This was a rented conference room at the Holiday
Inn where the reverend wore polyester robes and shouted a lot and had three
wives. The type of church you read about in
Time
after the fact. You know what I mean. A cult. A let’s-drink-the-Kool-Aid and
put-on-brand-new-Nikes cult. A what-the-fuck-are-you-thinking-Nif cult.