THE GRINDING

MATT DINNIMAN

Kindle Edition

Necro Publications

— 2013 —

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THE GRINDING © 2013 by Matt Dinniman

Cover art © 2013 by Erik Wilson

This edition © 2013 Necro Publications

ISBN: 978-1-939065-33-9

Assistant Editors:

Amanda Baird

C. Dennis Moore

Tara Cleves

Book design & typesetting:

David G. Barnett

Fat Cat Graphic Design

www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com

a Necro Publication

5139 Maxon Terrace

Sanford, FL 32771

www.necropublications.com

This is Book 7 in the Necro Fresh Flesh Series.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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To the city I left behind.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Part 1

Chapter 1

Let’s forget all this fourth wall bullshit and get to the point. You’re the reader, and I know you’re there. We’re supposed to pretend like neither of us exist, but if you’re going to trust me, we can’t start this off with our backs facing each other. My name is Adam, and I want you to look right into my eyes. This isn’t going to be a one-way exchange, no sir. It’s not fair to me, it’s not fair to Nif, and it’s not fair to you. I’m here. You’re here. And this is what really fucking happened the day they nuked Tucson.

Nif and I were there. We saw it begin. You may think you know what happened. You watch the news, follow the internet, and maybe you read that dumb book by the guy who wasn’t even there, and that gave you this feeling like you know what went down first-hand. But you don’t know. You can’t know. Unless you were there too, you don’t know shit.

So here’s the scene. We’re in a small arena. It’s a roller derby bout. Tons of people, but the only important characters right now are me; my wife, Nif; and her cousin, Cece.

“What is that?” asked Cece. She sat next to Nif and me in the stands, and she’d been staring hard at something for a while, her clove cigarette clinging dangerously to her bottom lip. I watched the cigarette, counting down to the inevitable dive of ash straight into the hair of one of the let’s-be-edgy-and-go-to-the-roller-derby sorority girls sitting in front of us.

Cece was a sturdy, box-shaped girl, a roller derby queen on and off the rink. Her derby name was “Peaches and Scream,” and everybody called her “Peaches.” Only me and Nif called her by her real name. About a month before, Cece’s leg was busted in two places in a spectacular, skates-over-head collision with the jammer for the Demon City Sallies. She now sported one of those casts that made her walk like a mummy. It forced a temporary vacation from roller derby. But my wife’s cousin never missed a bout, and she wore that cast like a heavyweight championship belt.

Cece stood heavily. “I’m gonna go check it out.” She clomped her way down the stands toward whatever had caught her attention below. I looked at the ponytail in front of Nif and me. Not a single ash had fallen on the girl’s head. I glanced to where Cece headed, but I didn’t see anything.

“Damn,” I said.

“What?” Nif asked.

I nodded toward the stairs. “Your cousin is all worked up about something.”

“What else is new?” Nif said, twisting in her seat. She scratched her arm. My wife seemed more distracted than usual tonight.

On stage, another scene played out. The halftime band, a local punk group, couldn’t get the PA system to work. Feedback blared, and the crowd booed and threw cups at the bewildered band. This was the first time I had seen them, and I could tell they weren’t used to the surly crowds.

“I almost feel sorry for them,” Nif said, scratching some more at her arm.

“What’s their name again?” I asked. They all wore T-shirts with something hand-written on them, but I couldn’t tell what they said from where we sat. The first word started with a “P,” the second a “V.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You won’t remember.”

A scream perforated the stadium.

Just like that. A scream, and the world changed forever.

This was a scream unlike anything I had ever heard. I thought maybe it was a cat at first. This was an unforgettable scream, high-pitched and piercing, sounding amplified even though it wasn’t—one of those sounds that causes every person who hears it to stop and look with dread.

I stopped. I looked with dread.

It wasn’t a cat.

I hadn’t seen where Cece went, but I saw her now. She stumbled backward on the track, tripping onto her ass, clawing at her face as she screamed. Her cast boomed when it hit the floor. She had something wrapped around her neck and on her head, like a mask. The pink and fleshy thing pulsated, a blob of living Silly Putty. As we watched, the pink color grew brighter, matching Cece’s Bombers jersey. The mass grew, covering more of her face. She screamed again, and a tendril of the blob snaked its way into her mouth, cutting her scream off cold.

This was not a typical halftime prank. Holy shit, no. Something was wrong. Cece rolled onto her stomach and twitched, the mass growing over the top of her head and down her back, covering the ‘Peaches’ on her jersey until the whole top half of her body disappeared.

The ponytail and her friends screamed. They ran, falling over themselves.

“The hell?” I said, jumping to my feet. Nif and I looked at each other. We both ran toward Cece. Half the crowd rushed toward her, the other half away, and the crush caught us. I reached and grabbed Nif’s skinny wrist, holding her close to me, and she wrapped her other arm around my waist, swearing at everyone, screaming for them to get the hell away.

Through the crowd, I watched as a girl—Panda-Monium, a pivot and the captain for the Punky Bruisers—grabbed Cece’s good leg. The moment she did, her body went rigid, like a goddamned Medusa statue. She fell to the ground, her hand still clamped on Cece’s ankle. Other roller derby girls crashed into Panda-Monium, and when any of them came into contact with her, they also froze. In a matter of five seconds, a glob of thirty people formed on the track and spilled over into the sidelines. The moment anyone touched the group, even through clothes, they became a part of it, frozen in place.

I stopped dead. Still on the bleachers, I pulled Nif back.

“Don’t get any closer,” I yelled over the screams.

“What the hell?” she said, trying to pull away. “She’s my cousin, Adam.”

She didn’t yet see what was going on, but many had, and the fearful and confused now surged away from the track and toward the exit. I watched as the band’s bass player fell to the ground. He kicked at a trapped girl near him. As he scrambled away, his foot slipped, and his ankle became attached to her neck.

Band mates tried to pull him away, only to be caught themselves. Soon a chain of bodies snaked across the track and into the middle of the center stage, with a dog pile around where Cece fell.

By now, enough people had cleared away that Nif could see what was happening. Everyone continued to stream out of the small arena, and in the distance, a police siren wailed.

“We gotta find a way to get to her,” Nif said, pulling toward the track. I couldn’t see Cece anymore under the pile of motionless people.

“No,” I said. “We don’t know what’s going on. The police are coming.”

Nif was only five feet tall. She weighed 95 pounds, if that. I should’ve been able to hold onto her. If I had been stronger, if I had used both of my damn hands, if I had been more insistent and kept her away, you wouldn’t be reading this right now. Everything would’ve been different. I would’ve pulled her out of that building. I would’ve gotten us into our car and driven away.

But that’s not what happened. I wish more than anything in the world it was.

She twisted out of my grip, and she got away from me. She bounded down the stands toward her cousin.

Chapter 2

I’m taking a dramatic pause right now because I have tell you a few things before we get to the most fucked-up part of this story.

Like I said, my name is Adam. I am 24 years old now, and I was 23 on that night last November. I’m half Irish, half Filipino if such a thing matters. I look like a tall, dark-haired white guy, and nobody ever guesses I have anything other than purebred ‘Merican in me.

According to all the records, I’m dead. If you look at that memorial that alphabetically lists all the people who died that night and the following morning, you’ll see an assload of Adams listed on there. I’m the third one. Nif and Cece are both on there, too. Nif is listed right underneath me, but they put her as “Jennifer.”

Everything you’ve heard about the Grinder is bullshit. Pure, simple bullshit. They don’t know what they’re talking about, those college-educated bozos on TV who’ve written whole books based on nothing but the thousands of YouTube videos people posted after that night. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the Kyl Commission’s initial findings. In fact, the only one who came close was that crazy asshole on The 700 Club who blabbered about demons and abortion and gay marriage. And even he wasn’t that close.

Don’t believe the reports that say it came from the science lab at the university. Or it rose from the reservation. Or came up from Mexico. They’re all wrong. I was there. I saw the damn thing born.

Most importantly, I know what it was. I know why it was here. You take every scary-ass theory from the past six months, and you roll them into a ball to make the freakiest, most terrifying thing you can think of, and you still won’t even be close.

But we’ll get to that. First, I have tell you more about Nif. I may be writing this in first person, but she’s the main character here. Don’t ever forget that.

This is Nif’s story.

Jennifer. She hated that name, so we all called her ‘Nif.’ I won’t say everything was perfect between us, because it wasn’t, but at the end of every day, we slept in the same bed, we kissed each other good night, and we both thought that we were going to spend the rest of our lives together. We didn’t have kids, but we had a ferret named Hamlet. Nif had tattoos and smoked just about anything available to smoke, and she was addicted to God, punk rock, and roller derby, in that order.

She didn’t compete in the roller derby herself. Her bones would’ve snapped like her cousin’s leg the first time someone knocked her onto the floor. But she was friends with pretty much everyone involved in the local scene, and she never missed a bout, dragging me with her.

Nif and I were in school together since the 10th grade, but we didn’t date until my senior year, and not until after she had dropped out. We worked together at Big Shot Chicken. I was shift manager, well on my way to take over the chicken-roasting world. Yeah, I was one of those guys. Straight-laced, did my homework, dotted my I’s and crossed my T’s. I had watched my dad fuck up my family’s world, and I was determined to do the exact opposite.

It’s funny; Nif had the same deal with her dad. The man was a genuine war hero, a pillar of society, the type of guy who won community awards and actually deserved them. The only thing he ever really screwed up was Nif.

She hated him for it. To this day, I don’t know what he did to make her hate him. I asked her once, and she started to cry like you wouldn’t believe. “I don’t know either,” she said. But by then, it was too late. This was at her mom’s funeral, and her dad had been dead a year.

The fast food gig, for me, was for my scholarship applications, show I could hold a job. My family wasn’t rich, so I had to go through the whole financial aid and scholarship crucible. The college gatekeepers liked things like track team, honor roll, chess club. Shift manager of a hole-in-the-wall chicken restaurant.

For Nif, the job paid the rent on her shitty little apartment. She was only 17, but she lived by herself. Her mom had figured 17 was close enough, and took off while her dad was out of town. He didn’t even know where Nif lived, though he came into Big Shot sometimes to try to talk to her and give her money. She wouldn’t talk to him, but she would take the money.

I was a total asshole manager. I remembered Nif from school, but she didn’t remember me, and that made me mad. It made me mad because she was one of those people you instantly recognized, someone you noticed when she was gone, and I had noticed when she’d dropped out of school the year before. For fuck’s sake, I sat right behind her in Spanish two years in a row, and she didn’t know me when she got hired.

She looked at me like she’d never seen me before.

This one night, we were the only two closing up the restaurant, and I was chewing her ass for not cleaning off the tables in the dining room. I was ready to go, and she’d spent the last ten minutes fucking with the radio because the DJ had promised to play a Bad Brains song. She was all excited because they never played that shit on the radio. I pointed out she had the CD sitting right there, but it didn’t matter. “It’s different when it’s on the radio,” she said.

“Yeah, it’s not as good,” I said.

“You know what, go fuck yourself,” she said. “People like you won’t ever understand.”

“Yeah, and people like you will spend your whole life waiting by the radio, when you got the CD sitting right there.”

She paused then, just looking at me, noticing me. We’d known each other for three years, we’d worked together for six months, and I’d finally gotten her attention. I even felt a little triumphant right then. But then she opened her mouth, and both of our lives changed forever.

“You either fire me or fuck me. That’s the only way you’ll get me away from this radio,” she said, leaning back against the wall. She pulled out a cigarette and lit it right there.

“But…but,” I stammered. I was never bad with words, except when I talked to her. I never even thought I liked her in that way until she said it. She wasn’t my circle. She was unique, an anomaly. I never thought we existed in a universe where she and I would get together. I wasn’t going to fire her. Maybe write her up, but not fire her. I couldn’t even fire her if I wanted. I didn’t know what the hell to say. “I don’t have a condom,” I said.

She laughed and took a long drag on the cigarette. She let the smoke seep out her nose, and I swear that cloud filled the entire ceiling of the restaurant like a storm.

“Either you’re a pussy, or you think I’m dirty. Which one is it?”

I was so out of my element. I don’t even remember what I said.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” she said, putting down her cigarette.

We fucked right there on the table. Right where we make the chicken.

I wasn’t a virgin, not by a long shot. I’d spent my whole junior year in a highly dysfunctional, insanely sexual relationship with a girl from the chess team.

Nif, however, was a virgin, and that blew my mind.

She had what seemed like hundreds of boyfriends. A parade of them, all tattooed and older. They came into the store every day to talk to her when she was supposed to be working. Those guys were her circle. But she’d never had sex with any of them. She chose me, seemingly on a whim. Just like that. I didn’t understand.

We didn’t get together right after that. After that night, she pretended like it had never happened, and we went back to our old routine of me being the asshole, and her being the unruly, I-don’t-give-a-shit employee.

But as much as she pretended, things were different. She stopped letting guys come over to the store, and sometimes, in my peripheral, I’d catch her watching me, but when I turned, she looked away.

Part of me wanted to never talk to her again. I had no plans on staying in Tucson, and I just knew hooking up with someone like her would keep me here. I knew what my friends would say. Stay away from her. What’re you thinking, man?

Nobody would guess we were a couple, at least not back when we first got together. I looked like what I was—a chess team nerd who corrected the chemistry teacher when he made a mistake.

And Nif? She was a punk-rock, skater girl to the core: full of piss and vinegar and fuck-you, even with her fine features like a porcelain doll you’d see for sale in the Sunday newspaper leaflet. Half Mexican and half white, she dyed her brown hair midnight black. So black, it would blend with the night sky, and she was just a disembodied, glowing white face. She always wore these striped, knee-high stockings and Doc Martin boots that weighed as much as she did. Everywhere she walked, her footsteps boomed, but she made it look graceful. When she walked into a room, you knew she was there.

And when she ran toward her cousin that night, when everything was still contained within the roller derby arena, everyone turned to watch her run. That’s just how it was with Nif. She moved, people noticed.

I screamed for her to stop.

She didn’t.

She got to the main scrum of girls, and she grabbed the back of a girl’s jersey, as if she planned to throw her aside to get to Cece. But as special as Nif was, she, like everyone else, wasn’t immune to whatever this was.

She froze, hands fixed to the back of the girl.

I continued to scream, only it changed from Stop! to No!

What could I do? That feeling of helpless horror, hardly ten feet in front of me, was unlike anything I had ever felt. I wanted to run up and help her. I almost did, too. I took a few steps forward. Someone grabbed my shoulders, and if he hadn’t, I would’ve charged right down there. But as much as it pained me to stop, I controlled myself after that first second. I couldn’t help her if I was trapped, too.

I didn’t run. I couldn’t leave her. I fell to my knees on the metal bleachers, crying out in frustration, almost falling forward. Nif stood there, paralyzed. I couldn’t see her eyes, but I could see the eyes of some of the others, and they held nothing. They remained frozen, like mannequins.

More people stood around me, equally horrified. I recognized some of them as friends and boyfriends of the roller derby girls. One man cried out and rushed down the last of the bleachers, and he grabbed at the group just as someone else tried to pull him back. Both of them became stuck, covering up Nif so I couldn’t see anything but her cherry-red Doc Martins.

The group of afflicted came too close, and if it grew any more, I’d be trapped. Crying and yelling, I ran across and down the stands so I’d have an exit at my back.

The group of paralyzed people continued to grow, but more slowly now that the arena had cleared. As I watched, helpless, a cop ran in, a big, barrel-chested guy with a mustache. I’d seen him before. While the folks in the local roller derby scene were a friendly bunch, fights did break out from time to time that required a police presence. I didn’t know his real name, but once the announcer had called him “Officer Beefycakes” over the PA as he entered the arena, and the name stuck. Whenever he came around now, the crowd would chant, “Beefycakes! Beefycakes!” and he’d wave. He stopped at the sight of the group, looking around in surprise.

“What…?”

“Don’t touch them,” I said, frantic. “If you touch one, you’ll get stuck, too. You have to do something. My wife is in there.”

He talked into the radio on his shoulder. He backed up, taking me with him. “How…how long?”

“It just started a minute ago. It happened so fast.” I told him what I saw, with the pink thing on Cece’s face, but I said it so quickly, I’m not sure he understood. I’m not sure he believed me.

“Everybody outside,” he called. He tried to pull me with him, but I shouldered away, numb with fear. For her. For myself. But I wasn’t going to leave her. Several of us remained in the arena, surrounding the group, just out of reach, all of us calling out names.

It happened so fast.

At one moment, the cluster was just that. A cluster of people.

It all changed in an instant. The long, tail-end line of people started to move. At first, it was a twitch, like a single snake or tentacle, attached to the large, unmoving mass where Nif was.

Then the line of people, fifteen deep, rose impossibly into the air. It swung up into the stands, slamming through the onlookers. A guy got smacked in the face with the body of the guitar still clutched in the hands of the trapped musician. He flew across the room, crashing against the far wall. He crumpled to the ground, unmoving as blood gushed out of his head.

“Fuck,” the officer said, pulling his gun. He aimed, but he didn’t have anything to shoot. The tentacle swung angrily in the air, back and forth, looking for targets. It picked up six or seven more people, all at crazy angles who swung loosely except at the point of contact, as if a thick wire snaked through, holding them in place like Christmas lights. Outside, more sirens blared.

The tentacle whipped toward the cop and me. I ducked as it whooshed over my head. The officer wasn’t as quick, and his face smashed against the legs of a captured body. He lifted off the ground.

I scrambled, crab-walking backward toward the exit, not looking away. The long tentacle lifted over the main mass and broke apart. People rained down on top of the group, reattaching at the top, turning the mass into a quivering ball of humanity. People rearranged themselves, moving in a strange, staccato manner, crawling sideways like flies on a wall.

I watched in horror as the ball became tighter, a giant sphere several people thick. I cried out Nif’s name. I couldn’t see her, but she was in there somewhere, crushed against the others. People in the ball had obvious injuries, but their faces betrayed no pain. I wondered if they were dead, or kept alive by whatever force that was doing this.

Suddenly, six shoots made of people sprouted from the thing.

No, not shoots. Legs.

The legs lifted the mass of sixty or seventy off the ground, like a giant bug. The heads and necks of the captured at the top of the legs worked as pivots, audibly cracking as they fell into place. The weight of the creature—and I was finally seeing it as a single, horrifying entity—pushed down on those being used as feet, and their legs buckled. More people crawled down the legs to add support on each side, shoring up where bones had broken. I watched as one zombiefied person gingerly removed the roller skates from a girl being used as a foot. The skates clattered to the floor.

The whole creature lumbered forward, stepping across the arena track and toward the exit. I huddled in front of the monster like a rabbit, frozen, not believing what I was seeing.

I almost puked right there. More officers rushed in, knocking me down. Like Officer Beefycakes, they stopped and gasped at the creature.

That’s when I ran. I stood, and I ran. Even as I fled from the building and out into the rainy night, I felt empty and guilty for abandoning her. My overwhelming astonishment at the—whatever the hell that thing was—was overthrown by the crushing, debilitating shock at losing Nif so suddenly. Was she in pain? Was she dead?

I wondered what happened to the police officers. I didn’t hear gunfire, which I was glad for. More officers pulled up, and the night filled with sirens and the wails of those who’d lost friends, including me, punctuated by the clatter of the rain against the corrugated awning at the entrance to the arena. I only ran a few feet out past the barrier, when I was blocked by a line of parked police cruisers.

I barely had time to turn around, look at the arena, and think, What the hell am I going to…

CRASH! The large, double-door entrance to the arena exploded in a blast of wood, metal, glass, and stucco, showering out into the parking lot. Bits of glass and metal ripped through the air. I covered my eyes and stumbled onto the hood of a police cruiser.

The creature barreled out of the hole in the arena door, moving like a cockroach. Screams of despair turned to fear as the thing passed near me and into the small crowd, snagging people and police officers before they even knew what was happening. Its six legs bogged down in clumps of frozen bodies. The front legs collapsed, and the thing fell forward, balling up like a 25-foot hedgehog, rolling right over cars and out into Grant Road. A small truck screeched as it careened into the thing, but the monster kept moving, showering the street with severed limbs and bloody clothes and tattered roller skates.

The ball hovered in the middle of the dark street for a few moments, tightened, and spewed dark blood from its top like a whale. The blood misted in the streetlights. The creature rolled west down Grant Road, picking up speed, leaving a crushed truck in its wake. The top was ripped off, the driver gone. A trail of body parts and gore smeared the street in its wake.

To my left, a lone police officer popped off his gun, to no effect. I ran toward the road, passed through the cactus hedge, and stopped at the curb. I stepped on something in the dark, and I fell, catching myself on a bus stop pole. I looked down, and saw a human hand, red and twisted like a dead spider, smashed into the curb.

The monster was a couple hundred yards away, careening toward the intersection. It blasted through, rolling over more vehicles.

The top of the beast hit a low-lying traffic light, and body parts sprayed into the night. Two of the ejected chunks looked like full people. They flew and landed hard in the middle of the road.

Before I even knew what I was doing, I ran toward them.

As I ran, the monster continued to roll down the road, going faster than I was. It swerved toward a Sonoran hotdog truck, packed with the Saturday night crowd. People screamed and scattered as it approached, but it caught at least another dozen victims before it veered back onto the road and rolled west.

I cried as I raced toward the intersection. With all the blood, all the body parts on the road, how could anything be alive?

The first person I came upon was a girl, and she was dead. She lay face down in the road, her head bent at an obscene angle. Her left leg was missing, and her arms bent backwards and up. But just past her was a kid I recognized, though I didn’t know his name. He was alive. He was a Mexican kid, maybe seventeen or eighteen, wearing nothing but jeans soaked black with blood. He’d been sitting near us in the stands, cheering for a girl on the Bruisers. The kid sat up in the middle of the road. His right hand was a bloody stump, and the only finger that remained was his thumb. He gazed west toward where the monster had gone.

I wanted him to be okay. I needed him to be okay. If he could become a part of that thing, be ripped off, and then be normal again afterwards, I would know Nif still had a chance.

“Hey,” I said, running up. The rain was pouring hard now, slapping into the street, causing the blood to run and pool toward the side of the road. Sirens blared from every direction, and to the west, a loud crash filled the night. More people came running from across the street, survivors of the attack on the hotdog truck.

They surrounded the guy in the middle of the road.

“Hey,” I said again, not wanting to touch him. “Are you okay?” Blood seeped from his hand. He didn’t acknowledge me, and my heart sank.

A Mexican woman stepped forward and wrapped his hand in a cloth. She talked softly to him in Spanish. More people stepped forward to help, or talk about what they’d just seen. Others wailed.

I stood, numb, watching the boy as he gazed unwavering toward where the beast had gone. A man gave the boy his coat.

The boy tried to stand, but people kept him down.

“I have to get back,” he said, his voice a whisper. He had a thick Spanish accent, and I wasn’t sure I heard him right. Around me, the crowd grew quiet. The night air filled with his ragged breathing, sirens, and the light clapping of the rain.

I pushed forward, my heart racing. He’s okay.

“What? What did you say?” I asked.

“I saw them,” he said, still looking west. Muddy tears or rain ran down his face. He tapped his chest with his bloodied hand. “Papa. They wanted me to stay.”

“Don’t worry, man, okay? We’ll get you some help.”

He turned toward me, moving in slow motion. The entire side of his face was cut up, like it had been dragged along the asphalt. His left eyelid hung on by a small patch of skin and sat glued to the side of his head by the blood.

“I know you,” he said. “You’re Adam.”

“Yes,” I said, stepping even closer. He emanated a strange, oil-like smell. “We see each other at bouts all the time.”

He stared at me, then said something that made my spine chill.

“Nif is searching for you.”

I froze. “What? What…”

“She’s calling to you. Right now. They’re calling you. I hear them here.” He patted his chest again. He looked west again. “But it’s going away.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. I became aware of how cold it was, but hope filled me. Nif was alive! Alive!

“Maybe you shouldn’t talk, dude,” another guy said to the boy. “We’ll get you an ambulance.”

A large crowd had grown around us, and a lady wearing scrubs underneath her jacket tried to push me aside to get to him, but I wouldn’t let her.

“How do you hear her? Where is she?” I asked, though I knew very well where she was.

“The Grinder. She’s in the Grinder.”

The boy cried out in pain, arching his back. He stood, despite everyone trying to hold him down, and he took off down the street, headed west, and calling out in Spanish. A few people gave chase but gave up after he passed the curb.

I didn’t know what to do. Above, a police helicopter roared by, following the path of destruction. I looked around, realizing we were in the middle of the intersection, and a traffic jam had formed around us. A couple people honked, probably those who didn’t yet know what had happened.

I have to get to my car.

Around me, the crowd burst into conversation. As I ran back toward the skate arena parking lot, I heard that word repeated several times.

The Grinder.

CHAPTER 3

“Fuck!”

I didn’t have my keys or phone. They were in Nif’s backpack, and that was still attached to Nif. I didn’t feel better, so I said it again. Then again. I pounded the roof of my El Camino.

People milled around the lot, huddled together and crying. Several more police cars had arrived, blocking off the exits. A few cops stood in the destroyed entrance to the skate arena, but as I watched, they received a call and rushed to their cars, rolling off. Five cop cars remained, all with pulsing lights, but no cops were left.

She’s calling to you right now.

“Hey man. Where’s Nif?” said a familiar voice.

I looked up and glared. Scooter. One of Nif’s old friends from when she worked at the record store. He saw my eyes and took a step back.

“Oh man,” he said. “I didn’t know.” He took a drag from his cigarette. “That blows, man. Wow.”

I didn’t like Scooter. I didn’t like any of Nif’s old co-workers from the record store. I don’t know what Scooter’s real name was, nor did I care. He was a short dude, maybe 5’5, and he had a pair of fuzzy dice tattooed on the side of his shaved head, which I thought was one of the stupidest fucking tattoos I’d ever seen. He was a talker, too. A guy who never shut up. He seemed to be everywhere we were. Concerts. Roller derby. Once we even saw him at the zoo with his parents. He drove a big-ass Suburban with a skull and crossbones decal on the back. I looked around, but I didn’t see it in the parking lot.

“You got your truck here?”

“Yeah.” He dropped his cigarette and pulled out his keys, which were attached to a thick chain on his pants. He nodded across the street to the Eegee’s parking lot. Sure enough, his old truck sat there, double-parked. “You need a ride, man?”

“Yeah,” I said. I took off across the street toward his truck, and he followed.

He didn’t stop talking.

“Man, this is some of the most fucked-up shit I’ve ever seen. When that fat Peaches chick had that thing on her face… Oh, sorry,” he said, remembering that Cece was Nif’s cousin. “Anyway, I thought it was like a joke. I mean, didn’t you? Remember last week when they set that dude’s ass on fire? That was a joke. He wasn’t even hurt or nothing. Anyway, I saw the thing before it happened, you know. I was on the floor waiting for the band to play, and I saw this slug thing…”

I was barely listening, but I paid more attention at that.

“…and she walked past me and started poking at this slug thing. It had come up from a hole in the floor. I thought someone had spilled a milkshake, so I didn’t pay too much attention at first. Then she ran past me, waving her arms like a chicken, and it was on her face, and I fucking laughed, man. I thought it was a joke. Then all that shit started… Man, it’s a fucking monster, isn’t it? Like that Cloverfield thing, only it’s made out of goddamned roller derby girls.”

In the distance, an explosion echoed, but I couldn’t see where it came from.

We ran to his truck, and he fumbled with his keys. He had to stand on the wheel to get the door open. But he got it open and climbed in. He looked down at me from the driver’s seat. “So, where we going?”

“We’re following that thing.”

His goofy, this-shit-is-fun smile faded. “Are you crazy? Why?”

“Why the hell do you think? It has my wife.”

Scooter shook his head. “I’m sorry, man, but I’m not going anywhere near that thing. If it doesn’t kill us, then the fucking Air Force will when they start dropping bombs.”

I pulled him out of the truck with my left hand and smashed him in the nose with my right fist. It was the first time in my life I had ever punched a person, and I’m pretty sure I did it wrong because my hand exploded in pain.

He dropped to the ground, his head banging into the open threshold of his truck. I put my foot on his chest, grabbed his key chain, and pulled until the belt loop on his Dickies snapped.

“Sorry, Scooter,” I said as I climbed into the truck and slammed the door.

Scooter stood, holding his face as blood poured. Behind him, workers from the Eegee’s stood wide-eyed. I felt bad, but then I remembered why I disliked Scooter in the first place, and my guilt eased. He screamed and pounded on the window as I threw the truck into reverse. He pulled out his cell phone, I presumed to call 911, but instead, he threw it at the windshield. And missed.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” I said as I tossed the truck into drive and drove away.

I had to get to the monster. The Grinder, the kid had called it. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I reached it, but I had to find Nif. If she was still alive, stuck somewhere in the middle of that thing, I had to find a way to help her.

She’s calling to you right now.

THEY’RE calling to you.

We’d been together for about a year and a half when she dropped a nuclear bomb in my lap.

“Adam,” she said one night, out of nowhere. “I had an abortion.”

We were downtown, eating at The Nomery, a favorite haunt of ours because it was good, cheap, and open 24 hours. We’d become regulars, meeting up with our friends, sometimes at 3 in the morning. Tonight, we were the only customers in the entire place, but she said it right as the waiter poured more coffee into her cup. The poor guy looked at me, eyes wide, and fled.

I just stared at her, my brain not processing her words. She might as well have said, “I’ve spontaneously grown a penis.” My brain rebooted. “What? When?”

“More than a year ago,” she said. “I got pregnant after that first time.”

I stammered. “I…what?” I always wore a condom, and she was on the pill, too. She insisted on the double protection. She was paranoid about getting pregnant.

At that, she burst into tears, and words just poured out of her. “I didn’t want to fuck up your life. I was always jealous of you. I wanted to be like you. You were going to college. You were going to be somebody. But I knew you weren’t some asshole, that you would never leave me if you knew I had a baby coming. So I got rid of it. Rid of them…” She sniffled again. “They were twins.”

I started to respond, but she kept talking, “But you didn’t leave, and I fucked up your life anyway.”

I went round to sit next to her in the booth and put my arms around her.

“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,” I said.

She sobbed and grabbed my jacket, burying her face.

“I love you,” I whispered into her ear. I meant it, too. “I don’t care if you had an abortion. I wish you had told me earlier, but it doesn’t change anything. You haven’t fucked up my life. I didn’t know what I wanted or who I was until I met you. You helped me find myself.”

She wrapped her arms around my waist and held onto me so tight, it hurt. She cried and cried.

“Remember rule number two,” I said.

She cried for a long time, and I didn’t say anything else.

She finally looked up at me, her face streaked with mascara. “You either marry me or dump me. That’s the only way you’re going to get me to let go of you right now.”

So I married her.

We were both 19. We got into my car, drove the 450 miles to Las Vegas, and we got married by a black Elvis impersonator at the first chapel we found. We went to some government place to make it official, then we drove home and announced it to all of our friends.

Sometimes I think about how things would’ve been if we’d kept the babies. Twins. Holy cow. We weren’t ready. Hell, we weren’t ready to get married, either. But I think we would’ve managed okay.

Nif thought about the babies a lot, too. It ate her up inside.

By the time she was 20, several of our friends were having kids. I could see it in Nif’s eyes every time she looked at one of her pregnant friends. She was thinking about what could’ve been.

We both wanted kids, but we both wanted to wait until we were older and made more money. And were less stupid.

Like with the drugs.

I smoked weed, but not too often. I tried heroin once. Acid three times. Cocaine a number of times. I never saw the big deal, then again, I never got addicted.

Nif smoked a whole lot more than I did. And while I think weed should be legalized and all that, I don’t think anyone would disagree that you shouldn’t be doing that stuff around a baby.

So we decided to wait. We both had a lot of growing up to do, and we didn’t want to risk screwing up a kid. As it turned out, Nif had more growing up to do than I thought.

Meth.

Fucking meth.

Meth is evil. Meth is vile. If you do it, you’re an idiot. Period.

A couple years after we got married, Nif worked part-time at a record store. She started hanging around her co-workers after work while I worked late and went to school. It was three guys in particular, including that little fucker, Scooter, who introduced her to it. That’s how it started.

We’d been together for three and a half years by then. I was much less naïve about drugs than when we first got together, but still, I had no idea she was fucked up on meth until it was too late. Nif was always a twitchy and scratchy girl, so I didn’t notice an increase in that, but her energy levels were suddenly off the charts. She became hyper sexual, and she worried less about birth control. She started getting mad a lot easier than normal, and she kept doing crazy, impulsive things. Like tattoo a Smurf on her neck. Or spray paint the living room wall of our apartment. Her dad had died a month before, so I figured it had something to do with that. I should’ve read the signs.

I was at school when I got the call. I was in a writing class at the community college, and my phone had been blowing up with calls. I ignored it because it was my night for people to critique one of my short stories. My teacher’s phone rang, too. When she answered, she looked at me and told me I was needed at the hospital.

Nif was in a coma. A bad reaction to meth. Her temperature was way high, something like 105, and they were afraid she was going to die. Meth. Fucking meth. I couldn’t believe it, but the moment they said it, it all made sense.

They wouldn’t let me see her. I kept thinking it was my fault. How could I have been so stupid to not notice my wife, the woman I slept with every single night, was fucked up like that?

By four AM, her fever broke, and she stabilized. The doctors were afraid she was going to suffer brain damage, but she seemed okay. I had never been so scared. She woke up and was ready to take a visitor.

I came in, and I grabbed her sweaty hands, and she held onto me with a vice-like grip, her eyes wild with fear.

“I saw our babies,” she said. “I died, and I went to hell, and our babies were there.” She cried and talked at the same time. “They were boys, Adam. And they were in hell, and it was my fault. They said unborn children go to hell if their parents go to hell, and I was bad.”

“It was just a dream,” I said. She looked so tiny, like a child herself in the large hospital bed. In the doorway, a nurse stood, shaking her head. I knew what she was thinking. Just another junkie.

“I’m so ashamed,” she said.

Her father had left her a ton of money, and I used a sizeable chunk of it to send her to a residential drug rehab here in Tucson.

I visited her as much as they let me, and she did improve, a little at a time, like that train going up the hill, I think I can, I think I can, but fuck, it wasn’t easy. She yelled a lot, cried a lot, blamed me for getting her fucked up, blamed me for not stopping her.

What was supposed to be four weeks of detox turned into six. Then twelve. She was released, but she struggled every single day with it.

She still dreamed of them. The boys, she called them. I have to be good now. I have to get to heaven, so they can go to heaven. It worried me, and I told her shrink the same thing. He didn’t seem nearly as concerned as he should’ve been. “Just be there for her,” he kept saying. But it didn’t seem like it was enough. I felt lost.

The day of her rehab graduation, she almost seemed back to normal. We got home, and I gave her a present I had been promising for a while. A crazy-ass sable ferret named Hamlet. He would bounce around the house and steal her soda cans, and she would laugh and clap her hands, and everything finally seemed okay.

But at night, things weren’t okay. She had nightmares. Terrible, waking-up-and-screaming-and-clutching-my-arm-so-I-bled nightmares about “The Boys.” She never named them, because that’d make them even more real.

Sometimes, after the dreams, she would rock back and forth in our bed, clutching onto her old, stuffed alligator. “They’re calling to me,” she’d say. Then she’d look at me with those beautiful, impossibly-large brown eyes and say, “They call to you, too.”

Chapter 4

So when the Mexican kid with the fucked-up hand said, “They’re calling to you,” it freaked me the fuck out. I didn’t know what the kid meant by it, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it as I careened down the road in Scooter’s truck. Grant Road was impossible to drive where the Grinder had rolled, so I took Pima, following the spotlight from the helicopter. The windshield wipers didn’t work, and I had to drive with the rain pounding on the glass. I blasted the heater. My right hand throbbed with pain where I’d connected with Scooter’s face, though it wasn’t busted.

Scooter had Operation Ivy’s Hectic blaring on the sound system, and I turned it off to listen to the radio as I drove.

The DJ talked to a breathless kid on his cell, describing what he’d just seen. The Grinder wasn’t on Grant any more. It had cut south across a residential area and took out The Loft movie theater on Speedway, reshaping itself to blast through the entrance and scoop up everybody within. The way they described it, it was much bigger than when I had last seen it, and it had grown legs again. It would go right over cars, peeling roofs off like sardine cans and snagging everyone within. The caller seemed to think it was a monster covered with people, not made of people.

I pulled up to an intersection, and the stoplights were out. I looked around. It seemed the power was out everywhere. Christ. I turned south, but the road was filled with abandoned and crushed cars. A group of people stood in the middle of the street. Oh, yeah, it came this way, I thought, and I turned and fought my way down a residential street to Speedway Boulevard, right where the Grinder was supposed to be.

Someone else was on the radio. At first, I thought it was someone who’d been at the scene with the Mexican kid. It wasn’t, but it was similar. A woman had been knocked off the creature, losing her arm in the process. She mumbled something about “the Grinder” and got up and tried to run toward it before she fell over dead.

The next caller did nothing but scream we had to repent. “It’s the motherfuckin’ rapture,” she cried. “The end of the world.” The DJ hung up on her.

I continued down Speedway. It was easier to pass through the destruction with the wider road. The Loft movie theater was razed. Power lines and smoking, crushed cars filled the street. The creature had devastated a row of grocery stores and Chinese restaurants. People ran down the street, and cars sped away from the direction I headed.

I didn’t have to drive much further before I found it.

I gasped.

It had more than quadrupled in size. The movie theater and restaurants were what had done it. The Grinder had shaped itself like a spider, with eight segmented legs each made of scores of people. The bottom of the creature rose at least ten feet high, with several legs, arms, and heads dangling in the middle. The damn thing had long surpassed T-Rex size. It lumbered toward the Sheraton hotel near the University of Arizona campus, and its top cleared the fourth level.

It casually walked up the side of the building. Human appendages shattered windows as it crossed over the hotel in a matter of seconds. It leapt off the building like a cat and crossed the street and trashed a Taco Bell before turning south down Campbell, cutting into the University of Arizona campus.

Groups of people in red shirts scattered, and gunshots rang out. But bullets did nothing to it. Absolutely nothing.

I drove over the median and pulled onto the sidewalk just outside of the hotel. From the fifth floor, a bloody, naked woman hung out the window, screaming, reaching toward the Grinder.

“Holy shit,” I said out loud when I realized where it headed.

Saturday night. The university hosted a home game tonight. Not just any home game, either. For the first time since I could remember, the U of A football team didn’t suck ass, and they played their arch rivals, Arizona State. I’d never been a huge football fan, but even I had wanted to go to this game. The street vendors had been up for almost two weeks hawking T-shirts in anticipation.

The game was sold out.

Arizona Stadium capacity: 57,000.

The police by now had figured out where it was heading and what it wanted. No longer was it the occasional gunshot. The gunfire transformed into a wall of sound as everyone in the city with a goddamn gun started shooting at it all at once.

The Grinder tightened into an egg shape, sitting on top of a packed parking lot off the road. It sat there, as if it was thinking about what to do. Two lines of police and random people with guns appeared on either side, one line blocking its approach south toward the stadium, the other across the street near the remains of the smoldering Taco Bell.

“Stop!” I screamed at the gunmen. Nif. But I knew they had to shoot.

The entire outer layer of the monster was a pulpy, red mass under the barrage of gunfire. It emboldened those with the guns. They closed in. Smoke rose from the lines of fire, and they marched like Redcoats toward the beast.

They shot from person to person. I don’t know why. Maybe to put them out of their misery, or maybe they were searching for that one spot that would topple the whole goddamned thing to the ground.

Only they never hit that spot.

In the distance, the stadium loomed like a giant face over the university’s stark buildings. It still had power, and the stadium lights blazed. From my vantage, I watched the panic in the stands as they all surged in fear at the monster. Despite the rain, the place was packed.

Someone had sounded the alarm. Even from a half mile away, I could see turmoil grow within as the confused masses filed out of the stadium.

A car flew from the center of the Grinder, landing on the front line of police officers, scattering them like birds. At first I wasn’t sure what had happened, but then another car flew out, crashing against the grass. The Grinder was somehow picking up the cars and hurling them. The last of the defenders on that side broke as the egg shape unrolled into a long, low-to-the-ground, centipede-thing the length of four train cars.

It pushed forward, ignoring the gunfire at its back.

I couldn’t look away. Watching the Grinder move was like watching one of those Asian contortionist ballets, but with scores of dancers. It would’ve been intoxicating, under other circumstances. The bloody, pulpy exterior of the creature constantly recycled. Every part of it remained in motion as people crawled, rolled, or shifted to reshape and move the beast.

Even the corpses continued to move. A headless body rose from the back of the centipede shape and crawled onto the back where most of the bullets now hit.

The monster shambled toward the stadium, raining blood. It took its time. Had it been injured in the gunfire?

A big-ass yellow bulldozer roared up Speedway, passing by my position in the parking lot and almost clipping Scooter’s truck. It blasted through the median, and concrete exploded through the air. The gunmen stepped away to let it through. They cheered as it rumbled toward the beast.

The dude driving that thing was either crazy or had balls of titanium, but he full-steamed toward the monster, cutting through the grass and the parking lot. He aimed straight for its tail end. The bulldozer raised the front shovel, and the driver jumped out at the last possible moment.

The damn monster rearranged itself to let the bulldozer pass. One second it was about to get creamed, and then the back of the centipede split into several directions while the front rolled out of the way. The people on it, momentarily detached, rained down onto the creature to form again. The whole thing happened in a matter of a second.

A head-to-toe tentacle, ten deep, swept from the body to snatch up the driver of the bulldozer. As the tentacle retracted, the whole thing formed back into the centipede and continued toward the stadium, moving quicker this time.

The bulldozer continued on its own, raging across the grass until it crashed into a wheelchair ramp and then the side of a brick building. The wall stopped it, but the engine continued to whine. The poor guy driving must have rigged it to just keep going.

I felt so torn, so helpless. I pushed the truck further onto the road, keeping a safe distance. The monster had to be stopped. Of course it had to be stopped. But I also felt so relieved when it escaped. I just wanted Nif back. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

Above, a loud A-10 Warthog cruised low over the monster, barely visible in the dark and rain. The nearby Davis Monthan Air Force base was home to a whole shitload of A-10s, powerful military aircraft designed to kill tanks and other armored targets. They were the perfect aircraft to deal with this thing. When Scooter said I’d be blown up by the Air Force, he wasn’t just talking shit. It was a real possibility, and I knew it.

But this one didn’t shoot. Or drop a bomb. Either it was unarmed or the pilot didn’t want to kill a monster made out of people. He didn’t do shit except circle for a bit, then head south toward base.

The closer the centipede got to the stadium, the faster it moved. I watched as it disappeared behind some buildings, then it flew through the air and attached itself to the back of the massive scoreboard on the north side of the stadium. It pulled itself over, cascading like a waterfall into the field still filled with tens of thousands of people.

I didn’t see much of what happened next…but I heard it. The terror at the roller derby was nothing compared to the uproar at the stadium, and I was still a quarter mile away.

Again, I was so torn. If only the bulldozer hadn’t missed. If only the A-10 had been armed with a bomb.

If only Cece had minded her own damn business.

If only… Even now, it hurts to let that fantasy live in my mind, even for just a flash of a moment.

And when I saw what crawled out of that stadium, I realized for the first time that there would be no happy ending to this. No way. This was more than just a fucked-up monster trashing Tucson.

This was the end of the world.

Part 2

Chapter 5

The end of the world.

When I saw that thing emerge over the stadium walls, back into the streets of Tucson, I knew we were fucked.

I was done. We were done. And by “we” I mean everybody. You. Me. Everybody.

So, I gave up. I know that’s probably not what you want to hear, but that’s what I did. I gave up. Just because I’m the narrator here doesn’t make me a fucking hero. I was done. All I cared about in that moment was Nif, and she was either dead, or trapped forever. I knew it to be true. So I backed up the truck and aimed it homeward.

It took a long time to drive home, navigating around the disabled and destroyed vehicles that littered the street like crumbs. Even when I got to the part of the city the monster hadn’t yet touched, it was still bad. People running away. Or goddamn running towards the thing. I watched in the rear-view mirror of Scooter’s truck as the monstrosity rampaged through the south side of town, near the airport and the Air Force base. Unable to bear anymore, I moved the mirror and turned off the radio.

It was almost ten o’clock by the time I got home. The rain had stopped, and the clouds dispersed to reveal a hazy sky lit by the half moon and the fires of the burning city.

I didn’t have my house keys, but I got in through the side window. Inside, the first thing I did was open up Hamlet’s cage and set him free. The ferret bounded outside. We lived near the edge of town, and I knew he’d be safer out there than in the house.

I grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, and I sat down on the couch.

I waited to die.

When I was a kid, my dad moved us all over the country following jobs and ridiculous dreams and whatever else struck his fancy. We ended up in West Virginia for a while when I was ten years old. We lived in a rickety-clackity trailer on the property behind a plantation-style house, next to deep, fairy-tale woods that spread for miles and miles. With no other kids nearby to play with, and a whole summer before me, I spent my days exploring.

I was a regular Mowgli for a while, swinging from trees and venturing through endless forest. The only other human I talked to was the old lady who lived in the main house. She fed me pot pies in her living room while she obsessively watched QVC.

Sometimes it would rain for days straight, and I’d run outside in nothing but my underwear and a pair of scuba goggles. I’d stick my face in the raging creek behind the house and look for frogs and box turtles. I’d almost been swept away a hundred times, but it was fun for me, and my parents never noticed I was gone.

After the storms, temporary ponds formed in the deep woods, lasting two or three weeks until they dried up. I would spend hours playing with these ponds…building dams, digging holes to connect them, or just splashing around in them with my Power Rangers.

After one particularly long storm, I found a large rain pond about two miles into the woods. It was filled with blobby frog egg sacs. I visited it every day until the sacs hatched, releasing thousands of teeny-tiny tadpoles into the shrinking pond.

Once I saw the tadpoles swimming around, I started to worry. How long would it take them to grow legs and hop away? I knew if it didn’t rain soon, the pond would dry up, and they would die.

I wanted to move them to the creek. For that, I would need a bucket.

“You can’t do that,” the old lady said when I told her. “You’ll either hurt them trying to get them into the bucket. Or they’ll die in the creek; it moves way too fast for such small creatures. That’s why mama frog laid her eggs in that little pond. It’s best to leave it be and let nature take its course.”

I didn’t want to leave it be. The closest regular water supply was that small stream just beyond our house, almost two miles away from the tadpoles. All the other rain ponds had dried up. Every day I filled two water jugs with water, trekked the long path to the tadpole pond, and refilled it to keep them alive.

I fought a losing battle. Some days, I’d make the trip two or three times, two miles each way. Every day, despite my replenishing of the pond, it got smaller and smaller.

I prayed for rain.

The clouds came, the sky rumbled, but it didn’t rain.

One Saturday, my dad woke me early and told me were going fishing. I had been asking him for a year to take me, so I was excited to go.

We never went fishing that day. We went to my dad’s jobsite and spent the morning collecting hunks of metal. Then we drove fifty miles to a place where my dad argued with a man over how much he’d sell it to him for. Eventually they agreed on a price, and my dad and the man went to a bar together. I was left alone in the truck until it was dark, and when my dad finally came out, he sat in the cab, put the keys in the ignition, and passed out.

It’d been a hot day, but it was a cold night, and I spent it shivering in the back of the truck under a blanket that smelled like oil and dog. I looked up at the dark and cloudy sky and prayed to God that it would rain, even if it meant me getting wet.

Still, it didn’t rain.

I didn’t make it back to the pond until Sunday afternoon. I lugged three water jugs out into the woods. It was so hard to carry them. I had to stop every few hundred feet to rest, and the trip took twice as long as it usually did.

I got there too late.

The tadpoles were dead. The pond had dried up in the heat. It was my fault.

I sat in the leaves, staring at the black, still-muddy hole filled with the dead tadpoles. I could smell the green, mossy water, but it was all gone. It felt as if an elephant stood on my chest, crushing me. I wasn’t even sure why I was so upset. I thought frogs were cool and all, but I didn’t love them. Why did I care so much? I think it was that I felt responsible for them. I had made the choice to take care of them, and even though I’d tried my best, I had failed them.

I fashioned a small cross out of some twigs and stuffed it in the depression made by the pond.

When I got home, the door was locked, and my parents weren’t home.

As I waited, it started to rain. I know, as ridiculous and ironic as that sounds, that’s what happened. It rained.

The old lady saw me outside in the downpour and let me in the big house. She microwaved a pot pie for me, and, as usual, QVC blared on the TV. I sat at her table, soaking wet, stewing with anger. At first I had just been sad. I had prayed for rain, and it came, but it came late.

“I hate God,” I said.

Startled, the old lady looked at me for a long time and then said, “Why is that, hun?”

So I told her. Only, when it came out, I didn’t stop at the frogs. I kept talking. I hated God because of the father he had given me, the father who never kept a promise, but continued to make them. I hated God because I continued to believe everything my dad said. I hated God for giving me a quiet, wallflower of a mother whom I hardly knew, and who hardly knew me. I was half Filipino on her side, and I didn’t know anything about myself or where I came from, and she never cared enough to share.

The old lady laughed, surprising me.

“Your parents love you,” she said. “I can tell. They’re just not good at showing it. You have to learn to take care of yourself, and that’s all there is to it.” She stood and took the now-cold pot pie out of the microwave and plopped it down in front of me.

It was the first time I had ever said anything to anybody about how my parents treated me. Her answer wasn’t earth-shattering or profound. Years later, I’d realize it was just an empty answer an uncomfortable adult gave a child when she didn’t know what to say.

She spent a few minutes watching me eat, then she continued.

“As for your frogs… Goodness me, Adam. The Lord doesn’t care about the beasts of this world. They have no souls. Their purpose here is to keep us alive and humble and happy. These tadpoles you tried to save… It was noble, but God wouldn’t answer such a prayer. God doesn’t see them. He doesn’t care if they live or die. How could he? If he did care, why did he put the puddle there? That would make him unkind, would it not?

“No,” she continued. “He put them there to teach you a lesson. Maybe a cruel lesson, but it’ll serve a purpose sometime in your life. When you care for something, I mean really care for something, it requires sacrifice to do it proper. Now I don’t know what sort of sacrifice you needed to make to save them tadpoles, but it was more than you were willing to give.”

It was a deeper answer than what she had said about my folks. I wasn’t sure I understood it, but it sounded important. It seemed like she wasn’t talking just about the tadpoles, either. Like she had given me a puzzle to put together with pieces that didn’t fit.

Either way, her answer made me feel like shit.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that conversation now as I sat on my couch, mourning Nif. I grabbed one of my Rubik’s Cubes off the table, and I worked it without even looking.

I did that often, when I needed to think. I owned over twenty of the cubic puzzles. One was always within reach. Every room of the house, at work, and in the car. Some people chewed on their fingernails. I solved Rubik’s Cubes, though it wasn’t a challenge anymore once I learned how to work it. My keychain even held a mini-cube, a present from Nif. I didn’t like that one much, but I would never tell Nif.

I could solve any 3x3 cube in under a minute. My record was about 15 seconds, though I’d gotten lucky that time.

Outside, my neighbors talked in the street. One of them had a radio, and they listened and cried. Some drove off, screeching into the night while others talked about it being safer here. Above, aircraft and helicopters streaked by.

They were too late.

The Grinder was now a full-fledged, Tokyo-destroying behemoth. It crawled into Arizona Stadium a centipede, a giant monster. It lurched out a mountain-sized destroyer of hope and faith.

We had power at the house, but out my window, the majority of the city looked dark. Fires burned everywhere. I turned on the television—nothing but static. I don’t know how long I sat and stared at the gray snow. My body felt numb, but my mind churned. I knew where I was, but I was so lost, it hurt just to look away from the static and think about anything at all.

A distant explosion rocked the house, knocking a framed and autographed picture of Pee-wee Herman off the wall. The glass shattered when it hit the floor. It was Nif’s, and she prized it. A moment later, the power faltered, but it came back. I stood and picked up the broken frame, and I stared at the inscription.

Jennifer,

I know you are, but what am I?

Pee-wee Herman

(That’s my name! Don’t wear it out!)

I never liked Pee-wee Herman much, but Nif loved him. He had been at some celebrity-filled, fundraising event she attended as a little girl. That’s when she got the picture. She said he was the only one who was nice to her.

I clutched the broken frame. The corner of the picture had bent and torn in the fall. Glass had scattered everywhere. When she sees this, I thought, she’ll be pissed.

That did it. I cried. I cried like a damn baby, bawling and wiping snot on my sleeve.

I felt ashamed. I had abandoned her. I thought of the guy driving the tractor that had failed to bring the monster down. At least he had tried something. I didn’t know who he was, but I bet he had a loved one caught up in the beast.

The phone rang.

Great. It was probably someone I didn’t want to talk to. Maybe Nif’s aunt—Cece’s mom. I let it ring out. A minute later, it rang again. I sighed. She had to be terrified, not knowing what had happened, where her daughter was. She deserved the truth as horrible as it would be to tell her.

I picked up the phone and stared at the number on the caller ID.

The phone clattered to the floor before I realized I had dropped it. It wasn’t Cece’s mom.

It was Nif’s cell.

Chapter 6

Shit. I scrambled, picked it up and answered fast.

“Hello?” I said. “Nif?” Please be there.

Noise. Lots and lots of noise, like the buzzing of a busy factory.

“Nif!” I called again.

“Aaa…Adam?”

I could barely hear her voice over the background noise, but it was her. My heart thrashed in my chest.

“I can’t hear,” she said.

“Nif!” I called again. Had she fallen off the monster? Escaped? She must have. “Where are you? I’ll come get you right now!”

“Adam,” she said, crying and talking rapidly. “I can’t hear you. I don’t know… I need help, but… I’m in a van. A truck. One of those armored bank trucks.”

“You’re free?” I said, pacing back and forth in the room. The glass crunched under my feet. “Tell me where. You need to get as far away from that thing as you can.”

“I saw things.” She said more, but her words were rambling and incoherent. I tried to interrupt, but she just kept talking. “There’s a bunch of us in here. Cece, too. Adam, she’s covered with her.”

Her? “I don’t understand. Tell me where you are!”

“We’re still inside,” she said, sobbing. “In the Grinder.” My joy at hearing her voice changed to panic in an instant.

That word again. This time from Nif’s mouth. “H-how are you calling me?”

Her voice sounded odd, a mixture between panic and something else I couldn’t figure out. “The bigger she gets… They lifted the truck up into her, and we got in, and we pulled Cece in…to keep her safe, I think, but part of Cece hangs outside, so she can connect, but she fills in any way of escape. Adam, I can barely feel her. Those of us who are loose, we touch her, and nothing happens. We’re locked in here. Adam, it’s like she doesn’t want us anymore.”

“Who’s she?” I asked. “Nif, I don’t understand any of what you’re saying.”

“We need help. Please, Adam…”

The power blinked out, and it stayed out. The cordless phone in my hand went dead.

I screamed in frustration.

I ran to our hallway closet and tore it open, looking for that old, corded phone that connected directly to the wall. Please, please be here. I found it after what seemed like hours, and I rushed, plugged it in and dialed.

Nothing happened. I hung up and listened. No dial tone. Either the phone was broken, or the phone line was dead. I cursed and threw it across the room.

I went outside, and a group of my neighbors stood there in the gravel surrounding a boom box. They stared at me, mouths agape. I must’ve been pretty loud in there.

“I need a cell phone,” I said. “Please!”

No one moved. “Please,” I repeated. “My wife is caught up in that thing, but she just called me.”

That got them moving. My neighbor lady with all the dogs pulled out a phone and tossed it to me.

No service.

I jumped on the hood and then the roof of Scooter’s truck, but the reception didn’t change.

“Mine’s out, too, man,” another guy said. “They should still work in a power outage, but the tower must’ve been knocked out or offline. They went out the same time as the electric. So did the radio.”

“Fuck,” I said and jumped down. I handed the woman back her phone and ran back inside.

Think, think, think.

I paced back and forth.

Outside, the whip-crack of more explosions ringed the air, closer this time.

Then, I had an idea. Not a good one, but it was better than nothing.

I opened the back door, and Hamlet bounded back inside. He had caught a bug in the mud of the backyard. I left the door open in case the monster came close, so he could escape. I left the house, jumped into the truck, and headed out.

In the distance, the city spread like a dark blanket, punctuated by hundreds of fires. Above, several lights filled the sky. I couldn’t see the monster, but I watched as red tracer fire from a military aircraft strafed the darkness below.

The twins.

Royce and Randy Dominguez. If anybody could come up with a plan, it’d be them.

Chapter 7

Of all my friends, the twins were the only ones I’d kept from before Nif and I hooked up. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Chuck and Luke and Monobrow Sam anymore, but everything changed once Nif and I got together. They all went off to college, off to lives as engineers and scientists. They thought I was ruining my life by staying behind with her, and they just moved on, and away, from me.

I didn’t try too hard either to keep in touch. Nif’s circle was much more accommodating and friendly than I thought they’d be, at least once I started to look the part.

The twins knew a bit about being ostracized, and they lived in a community that had accepted them for who they were. They remained in Tucson, even after their parents moved away. They remained friends with me, and my new friends, along with all the old guys from high school.

You might not recognize their names, but I bet if you’ve ever watched television, you’ve seen the twins. They had a reality show for a while that followed them around high school until the principal kicked out the camera crews. He’d heard the producers were bribing girls to fake interest in the twins.

I appeared on the show, too, three whole times, but this was all before we became close friends. I didn’t have any speaking parts. Nif showed up a couple times also, scowling in the background.

The sight of Royce and Randy was difficult to get used to. It’s not every day you go to a new school, take your seat, and realize the person sitting in front of you has two goddamned heads.

Siamese twins, some people call them. It’s supposedly an offensive term, but they used it themselves.

In case you don’t know, here’s the info from their Wikipedia page:

Two heads. Two necks. Normal number of everything else on the outside—normal for a single individual, that is. On the inside: two spines that fused together just above the pelvis. Two hearts. Four lungs, but only two were fully functional. Two stomachs. Three kidneys. One reproductive system. Each one controlled a side, and they walked kind of funny, but they ran faster than you might think. One of them (Royce) was a bit more skewed than the other, but in high school they were both good-looking in their own way. They had moved to Tucson as infants from Argentina to get treatment from the University.

I did the whole pretending-not-to-notice thing for a while, even when the TV crew invaded our school the last half of sophomore year. When we wound up together in the rocket club, we became friends. I even started thinking of them as two different people.

It’s funny, how different they were. Both of them were geniuses, even back then. Royce was more into physics and astronomy, where Randy loved biology and military history. Both of them were horror buffs, books and film. They had a thing for circus sideshows and movies about freaks. To their mother’s dismay, their room was filled with cool posters and action figures for movies like Freaks, Basket Case, House of Wax, etc.

Randy used to say when they graduated they would join the Marines and be a sniper team. Their reality show even did this whole thing where the TV crew took them to the recruiter’s office. The look on the guy’s face in the office was priceless.

They never did join the Marines.

I asked them once, after we’d been friends awhile, about how they planned on having separate girlfriends with only one dick. Everyone wanted to know, but I was the only one brave, or brash, enough to ask. They were cool, even funny, about it.

“That’ll be the best part,” Royce said.

“We’ll get twice the action,” Randy said. “We both feel it.”

It turned out this other set of conjoined twin girls the same age, just like them, lived in Wyoming. The TV producers set it up so they could meet for the first time, and they had this grand idea that the four of them would fall in love and have foursomes and all that. It turned out they hated each other. Randy called one of them a cunt with all the cameras rolling. That was the end of that.

After high school, the camera crews left them alone, and the twins went to the U of A. They both graduated in three years with science degrees—astrophysics for Royce and biology for Randy. They went to graduate school, and even taught undergrads, but they had to quit over a medical issue. I don’t know all the details, but they had surgery on their chest, and afterwards they got tired easily. So they ended up jobless, and played video games all day. They did have a side business—not quite legal—but it was pretty lucrative.

They collected and sold guns.

They lived five minutes from me, but it took almost a half hour to drive to their house. The streets were packed with cars, some of them abandoned even though the monster hadn’t come this way. I had to travel the side streets and cut across a park filled with homeless people who threw beer cans at me as I passed.

Once I got to Royce and Randy’s place, there was no view of the rest of the city. When I pulled up, the twins were in front of their house, sitting on a bench and watching the sky. Airplanes and helicopters continued to strafe the Grinder, but never dropped any bombs. Based on the position of the aircraft, it looked like it was a good eight miles or more away, still on the south side of town.

“We were expecting you,” Royce said as I got out. They wore sweatpants and a ripped T-shirt with Freddy Krueger on the front. The door to their Jeep was open, and the radio blared RUSH.

Across their lap sat the biggest, weirdest shotgun I’d ever seen. It only had one barrel, but it sported a rotary wheel like one of those old school, Al Capone Tommy guns.

“It’s an AA-12,” Royce said as I walked up. “Gas powered.”

“Good for zombies,” Randy added. “Not so good in this situation. Her name is Velma.”

“Like the hot chick from Scooby-Doo,” Royce said.

“Guys…” I said.

“We heard about Nif,” Randy began. “That Scooter guy was here, and…”

“She’s alive,” I said, interrupting before he could go off on one of his tangents. “She called me.” I told them about the phone call.

“Whoa,” Randy said. “And you’re sure it was her?”

“Of course it was her!” I said. I swallowed. “I want to help her escape.” I swallowed again. “And I need your help to do it.”

“I’ve already figured it out. It’s an illusion,” Royce said.

“Goddamnit, Royce, are you listening to me?”

I’d lost him. He just went on with his crazy theory. “It’s not physically possible for that creature to exist.” He shook his head while Randy looked on in scorn. “If it was that size, it’d collapse under its own weight. Though I gotta admit, the human shield angle is pretty smart. Flesh is especially good at stopping bullets. Plus, there’s the psychological aspect. I imagine it’s fairly difficult to shoot a missile at a creature when you see your grandma sitting on its shoulder through the crosshairs.”

“Royce,” I said, taking deep breaths so I didn’t punch him like I did to Scooter. “It’s not an illusion. Have you looked out there?” I waved toward the city. “Half the fucking town is on fire. I saw it born. Didn’t Scooter tell you how it came to be? He saw it, too. He was closer than I was.”

“Nah,” Royce said. “He was just whining about getting his truck and cell phone stolen.”

Randy laughed. “His nose is the size of a turnip. We didn’t know you had it in you.”

“I don’t give a shit about that little fuck,” I said. “We need…”

“Wait. This is important,” Royce said, interrupting. That was their thing. Besides having two heads, I mean. They interrupted. A lot. They drove half our teachers into early retirement. “That little dude is really pissed about you jacking his truck. He’s got friends with him, too. Those skinhead bastards. The real ones, not the wannabes. We just sold him a Glock.”

I paused. “You sold him a gun when you knew he was looking for me?”

They shrugged. “We didn’t know until after he had it in his hand,” Royce said.

“But don’t worry,” Randy said. “We gave him a clip filled with blanks.”

Royce nodded. “Except there might be one in the chamber. I can’t remember. So try to get him to fire a warning shot first. After that, you can fuck with him.”

Under other circumstances, the thought of someone pissed at me enough to buy a gun would freak me out beyond words. But at the moment, I didn’t give a shit.

“Look. Fuck Scooter. Nif is alive, and the monster is real. I was there. The actual creature, on its own, is small, no bigger than a cat. Then, people touch it, or touch an infected person, and they are instantly attached. It takes over their mind, making them move and rearrange themselves all around it.” I told them about Cece and everyone at the roller derby, and the Mexican kid, and how it got into the stadium.

They were both silent when I finished. They looked deep in thought, and I wondered, not for the first time, if they could secretly share thoughts with one another.

“So,” Royce said. “I was right. It’s not a giant monster.”

“It’s like a wolf wall,” Randy said. “Or a Swedish fall. But a lot bigger. And without the cheerleaders.”

“It hit the football game, remember?” Royce said.

“Oh yeah. I guess it did suck up some cheerleaders. I’m glad we didn’t go. We had a ticket, you know.”

“If I have to sit through one more insipid football game just so you can get a faggy cheerleader hard-on…”

“Hey, it’s your cock getting hard, too.”

Going off on wild tangents. That was another one of their things. “Guys...” I said, growing ever more frustrated. “Please.”

“Aliens,” Randy said, not missing a step.

“I concur,” Royce said. “Softening us up for an invasion. Do we know if this is only happening here?”

“I don’t know,” I said. It was the first I thought of that. Was this happening in other places? If so, that changed a lot of things. First off, it meant the response to this disaster would be pretty slim compared to places with larger populations, like, say, Los Angeles and Phoenix.

Randy turned so I could look into his eyes. “The answer is simple.”

I waited.

“You gotta kill the thing attached to your wife’s cousin.”

“No shit,” I said. “How do I get to it?”

“We don’t know,” Randy said.

“Listen. You’re the smartest guys I know. I need ideas. I need to save Nif.”

“She’s in an armored car, right?” Royce asked. “Interesting. I wonder why it’d do that for her? There must be something important about her.”

“Whatever you decide,” Randy said, “You better do it quick. They’re going to drop a MOAB on that thing sooner rather than later, and that won’t be pretty. It’ll spread soylent green all over the southwest.”

Royce nodded. “We’ll be seeing some fat coyotes in the coming months.”

“Wait,” Randy said, turning to halfway look at his brother. “It attaches, even through clothes? What about shoes?”

I remembered a guy kicking at a person when it first formed. He got stuck, but only after his ankle became lodged. I told them what I saw.

“I don’t think this is magic,” Randy said, “Just because we don’t understand it. There must be something physical happening, probably on a very small scale. The Irukandji jellyfish unleashes these tiny harpoon-like stingers from its tentacles in order to capture prey. They’re so small, they can pierce fabric. I bet this is something similar. Only in this case, it grows fast and immediately connects to your nervous system.”

“And that guy you were talking about,” Royce said. “You said he wanted to run back to the monster. That means it messes with your head, even after you’re free. Tell him about the zombie caterpillar thing.”

Randy nodded. “The Glyptapanteles. It’s a parasitic wasp from Central America. It lays its eggs into the bodies of caterpillars. The eggs hatch and leave the host, but not before they do some serious rewiring to the caterpillar’s brain. The larvae emerge from the caterpillar’s skin and attach to a branch or leaf to pupate. After the larvae leave, the host caterpillar is still alive, but it’s turned into a giant guardian zombie. It just hangs out below the pupating wasps, unmoving, starving to death until a predator comes along and tries to eat the babies. Then it goes berserk, thrashing about like Monobrow Sam at the Metallica concert. Ha. You remember that shit? Anyway, it’s been brainwashed into protecting the baby wasps.”

“Zombies,” Royce said. He patted the gun on their lap. “Maybe we’ll get to use Velma after all.”

“The point is,” Randy said, “it may seem like an indestructible, earth-stomping magical beast, but even the craziest biological entities still have a scientific basis for existing. And that means, there’s gotta be a way to kill it.”

Hope surged in my chest when he said that. But only if it meant saving Nif at the same time. My mind was on a roll with questions. “What about these caterpillars?” I asked. “What happens to them after the wasps hatch and fly away?”

They shrugged. “They die a day or two later.”

Horrified, I looked between the two. “I don’t want Nif to die,” I said. “I don’t want her to be a zombie, either.”

Royce patted my shoulder. “Like we said… It sucks. But there might not be anything you can do. This isn’t the kind of monster that’s usually defeated by a single dude in the movies.”

“I don’t care about defeating the monster. I just want to save my wife.” I exhaled. “Or die trying.”

I didn’t realize it until I said it, but I meant it. I would die to save her. That’s a pretty potent realization, and I know people say shit like that all the time. I can’t live without you, baby. But I knew it was true. I could feel it in the beating of my heart. I had run away from the monster earlier—which was the smart and prudent thing to do, but I had felt so damned guilty and empty about it. Now I realized why I felt that way.

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

“Let’s figure this out,” Royce said.

Chapter 8

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.

Chapter 9

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.

Chapter 10

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.

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.

Chapter 11

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.

They believed some crazy shit, stuff about planets and ancient aliens creating Jesus from monkey DNA mixed with their own. Our life was nothing but a 2-D hologram projected on something-or-other. The reverend was a dude named Cornelius Snow, a paunchy, albino Elvis look-alike with oversized prescription sunglasses he wore even in the dark. He talked a lot about taxes and the government. But the overwhelming theme of the one sermon I attended was redemption. If you made a mistake, committed a sin, when you died, you weren’t just forgiven your sins, you were taken to an alternate universe where your sins never occurred in the first place. But only if you had the key.

I never found out what this metaphorical key was or what was required to obtain it, but I assumed it involved blowing up IRS buildings and providing oral sex to the good reverend Snow.

The service scared the crap out of me.

I was afraid to tell Nif what I’d thought of it. She seemed finally at peace. At night, she slept more soundly. No nightmares. I feared if she felt I worked against her newfound faith, she’d push me away, and then there’d be nobody to protect her if this church went south.

Luckily, Nif’s enamor of the church lightened up over the next month. They tried to get her to leave me, and to take her money. Something about a land purchase out in the middle of nowhere. Whatever hold they had on her thankfully gave way to reason.

Still, she was different after that. Before she slit her wrists, she had desperately been looking for a spiritual way out from her nightmares and whatever else was going on with her. None of the solutions she sought worked. Deep down, I suspected she thought all the religions she tried were bullshit. Till this one church, the craziest of them all. I never understood how they were any different than any other church she tried. But after she left, all the crazy cult stuff went away, and the inner peace she had found appeared to remain.

What also remained was a deep faith in a higher power. It wasn’t the Christian or Muslim or Mormon or Wiccan or any other god of an organized religion. Whatever it was, it helped her, and for that, I was happy.

But now, as I ran through the traffic jam on my way downtown, I wondered about the night I found her in the tub. I had assumed it was the dark depression that had fallen over her, and that had been caused by the nightmares and other post drug addiction baggage. It never occurred to me that her problem wasn’t that I hadn’t been able to save her. That it was just…me.

But if I was her problem, why didn’t she say anything? She acted like she loved me. She left me notes in my lunch for work. Usually they were stupid little sayings or quotes from a Ramones song, but they made me laugh. We had a whole lot of sex. When we slept, she wrapped her arms and her legs around me. She told me all the time I was her best friend, and that I was the only person who kept her sane.

I didn’t understand.

Chapter 12

Above, the earlier rain clouds had dissipated and were replaced by a red, smoky haze, and the acrid stench of something that shouldn’t be burning. It was 1:30 AM, and if I wasn’t jogging, I’d be half frozen to death. It’d been in the 80’s earlier in the day, which was warm, but not unheard of for November. But the early-evening rain was strange, and even though it’d been hot during the day, it was now freezing.

Plenty of cars were available to me, but they were useless at this point. The closer I got to the university, the more jam-packed they were. It appeared the survivors of the attack on the stadium had tried to flee this way, and the narrow street had ended in disaster and utter gridlock. It was eerie, seeing so many cars and so few people.

I didn’t have the sense of being alone, however. Noise rose from every direction. Car engines revved on side streets. Loud whispering erupted as I passed a few houses. (“Look, it’s a cop.” “No. That’s just a douchebag with a gun.”) I heard hammering as I passed one house, like the person inside was blockading himself in. Gunfire crackled from all directions, and I don’t think it was aimed at the monster. I tightened my grip on the bag and the shotgun as jets and helicopters and whooshing missiles and distant explosions continued to echo, starting and stopping in waves.

And dogs. I never heard so many dogs in my life. Every single dog in the city howled. The sound had been rising in volume over the past twenty minutes, and now they were letting the terrified city have it. It was unlike anything I had ever heard.

Above, a huge shadow moved across the night sky. At first I thought it was a secret stealth airplane or maybe a fast-moving cloud, but the rustle of wings and squawking gave it away. It was a tumultuous, shuddering flock of birds. They angled southeast, purposely toward the Grinder.

As the cloud grew and the din rose, I stopped on the sidewalk to stare. They were headed into the monster, like moths into a bug zapper. From how far away were these birds coming? Were other animals on the way to the beast also?

The dogs of Tucson continued to howl.

While the city and county weren’t all that dense with people, the Sonoran Desert was the place to be if you were a coyote or javelina or mountain lion or one of a million other critters who called the outskirts of Tucson home.

In fact, I realized right then and there, if I was a monster that could get stronger and larger by collecting living things, and I wanted a bit of variety, Tucson was the perfect place to start my rampage.

If I was going to save Nif, I was going to have to do it fast.

I decided I was being a pussy about stealing a car. The main road was too blocked to traverse, but the side streets were more or less clear. I stopped jogging, and I looked into a car sitting on the sidewalk with the window down. It was a newer VW bug, white with pink trim. Greek letters were embroidered into the car seats, maybe for some sorority. The keys were still in the ignition, and voices rose from the car’s speakers. She had satellite radio, I realized. I opened the door to step in.

A blazing spotlight focused on me from above. I looked up, startled as a helicopter came to hover over me.

“Do not move. Put down your weapon,” an amplified voice yelled over a loudspeaker. “We will shoot you if you don’t comply.”

“What the hell?” I said, dropping the shotgun on the sidewalk. I also dropped the bag, tossing it onto the hedge next to me.

“Let me see those hands, son,” the voice boomed. The helicopter lowered, kicking up debris and rocks from the street. Instead of raising my hands, I shielded my eyes, but the voice in the sky didn’t protest.

Two lines dropped from the helicopter, and a pair of soldiers in all black slid down the line. One landed behind me, and the other landed on top of the VW’s roof, smashing it in. Both pointed their weapons at me.

I looked between the two soldiers. They were decked out like twin, Special Forces Rambos. Helmets with dark visors and built-in respirators protected their faces, and each wore black chemical suits with heavy-looking overalls with tons of pockets and knives and grenades and other things that were just as deadly.

The helicopter lifted and zoomed off toward another neighborhood, its spotlight searching the ground.

Once the roar of the chopper faded, the soldier on the roof of the car said, “Is this your vehicle?”

I looked between the two and lowered my arms.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I said. “A monster is trashing the city, and you’re going to jump on my back for stealing a car?”

“Answer the question, sir,” the car-roof soldier said.

“No, this isn’t my car,” I said.

“Where did you obtain the vest and weapon, sir?”

I could understand a normal cop on a normal day having issues with a guy in a Kevlar vest and an automatic shotgun breaking into a car in the middle of the night, but now? It didn’t make any sense.

“Houston,” I said.

“Have you had any physical contact with either the creature or someone who has been in contact with the creature?”

I realized then why he was asking me so many questions. They knew about the monster’s drones—and they thought I might be one.

Was it possible to “catch” whatever it was just by touching a drone? That gave me pause. I tried to think if I had touched someone after they’d been in contact with the Grinder. Maybe the Mexican kid? But I couldn’t remember if I had contact with him or not. I didn’t think so. And what about the guys I’d just shot? Had any of their blood gotten on me? I’d touched Royce and Randy after they’d been touched by the drones, and their blood was all over me. That would probably count as “contact,” but I wasn’t going to tell these guys. Hell, if the Grinder had walked up and licked me I wouldn’t have told them that either. Not with those guns pointed at me. For all I knew, they had orders to shoot anyone who so much as walked funny.

“No. I’m just trying to make it to my girlfriend’s house,” I lied.

Both of them lowered their guns slightly. The one on the roof jumped onto the hood, almost slid off it, and jumped down. He was tall, like 6’8” or so. Even through his chemical suit, I could tell he was rail thin. Like a beanstalk.

“You can’t be out here,” the beanstalk said. “For the past several hours, the emergency broadcast system has been reading off the evacuation points across the city. Make your way to a point to receive transport out of here. Otherwise, you need to remain indoors.”

“Look,” I said. “I’m all about getting off the streets. I just want to get to my girlfriend.”

“Hey,” the other one said. “He’s got blood all over his pants.”

Both the weapons came back up.

“Sir,” the soldier said. “We’re going to have to ask you to come with us. Please place your hands behind your back.”

The other soldier talked into a radio while the beanstalk produced a pair of those plastic zip-tie handcuffs. If I didn’t fear a bullet in the back of my skull, I would’ve tried to run. Instead, I was pushed against the car while the too-tight handcuffs were placed on my wrists.

“He’s got a wedding ring on,” the not-so-tall one said. “Girlfriend’s house, huh?”

I grimaced. “I have a very complex relationship with my wife.” I did my best to act calm, but on the inside, I kicked and screamed and fought. Panic washed over me. I was blowing it. I had to find Clementine. I had to save Nif. I didn’t have time for this.

“Look,” I said after a moment. “I really do have to get out of here. Where are you taking me?”

“You’re going to stay put until our ride arrives,” not-so-tall soldier said. “We’re taking you someplace safe to run some tests, and if you check out, you’ll be put on a transport out of town.”

“What sort of tests?”

Neither answered.

They don’t have a test. How could they, so quickly?

As I leaned against the car, I realized the voices were still talking on the radio. As the soldiers whispered amongst themselves, I leaned in to hear the newscaster. The volume was too low to follow the conversation, but it was something about a mass exodus on I-10 both east and west out of town. The words “quarantine” and “riot” were kicked around quite a bit.

That’s just wonderful.

The soldier’s radio crackled, sounded like some sort of orders. “Let’s go,” the beanstalk said, grabbing me by the wrists. The other one grabbed the shotgun, but he missed the duffel bag on the hedge. I debated whether or not to point it out. I decided against it, figuring my odds of seeing it again were higher by leaving it here. I didn’t know what the twins had put in the package for their baby mama, but knowing them, it was explosives or something equally illegal.

We walked down the street into a neighborhood filled with smaller houses. Candlelight danced in several windows, lighting people’s faces as they watched us from inside their homes.

“How come you guys are picking on me,” I said. “Look at all these people. They’re just smart enough to stay inside.”

“We’re not picking on you, sir,” the beanstalk said. “We’re taking you to safety.”

“I doubt that,” I muttered.

A couple minutes later, we stopped at a corner on a side street just as a Hummer pulled up. They opened the doors, shoved me in the back, and got in. The driver was decked out with the mask like the other two. “We got another pickup a quarter mile away,” the driver said, revealing herself as a woman. “Then we’ll head back.”

The beanstalk got in the front passenger seat, and the other guy sat in the back part on the outside. I was alone in the backseat.

“What’s this guy’s story?” the woman asked.

“He’s neither C-1 or 2,” the beanstalk said. “Just a Civ. Taking him in to be sure.”

“What’s a C-1?” I asked.

“You don’t want to know,” the driver said, pulling away from the curb. I looked around, trying to get my bearings. I wasn’t sure where I was anymore. This was a residential neighborhood somewhere between Broadway and 5th street, but I didn’t know where. At least we were headed in the direction I wanted to go.

“How did you guys get here so fast?” I asked.

The driver was much more talkative than the other two guys.

“In case you hadn’t noticed, a monster is stomping through some of the United States’ most valuable assets. That has a tendency to light a fire under the military’s ass. We’re from Ft. Huachuca,” she said, which I knew was about an hour and a half drive south of Tucson. “We were fixing to deploy overseas when we heard about Arizona Stadium. I’m a Wildcat myself, and I was listening to the game on my iPod when it happened. A bunch of us flew in on helicopters just in time to watch DM get obliterated. The whole thing rolled through the boneyard, destroying billions of dollars worth of stored aircraft. I didn’t see any of that, though. I drove straight up in this thing. I got here an hour or so ago.”

“I saw it from above,” the beanstalk said. “It threw a horse at us.”

“It doesn’t seem like we’re doing so hot,” I said, leaning back against the uncomfortable seat. “That thing is kicking our ass, and it’s sucking animals into it now, too. Did you see those birds?” The zip ties burned my wrists, and I shifted uncomfortably.

“I saw the birds,” she said.

We pushed our way through two cars jammed together at an intersection. A couple blocks over, flames shot thirty feet into the sky from a row of townhouses.

“I used to live a couple blocks from here,” the driver said. “I can’t believe this.”

She spoke into her radio and turned away from the fire, heading down an alley. We turned another corner and pulled up on two more soldiers with a guy in handcuffs laying on the ground. The guy twitched, and his leg was bent in the wrong direction.

“You’re not putting that dude next to me,” I said.

They stopped, opened up the side—and put the dude next to me. One of the other soldiers slid into the back seat so the twitchy guy was in the middle, leaning up against me, and the other soldier jumped in the back with the tall guy’s partner. This new soldier also wore the respirator mask, but his uniform was camouflaged.

“We got a C-2,” the new soldier said. “Found him trying to break into a car, walking on that leg. We had to subdue him.”

The twitchy guy stank like oil and wore a Circle K uniform. He was passed out, which was good for him because that leg looked like it hurt. It got caught on the seat when they shoved him in, and it bent at an unnatural angle, like the only thing keeping it attached was the skin around the outside. The guy was older, with a beard. Every couple seconds or so, his whole body would twitch, like he was being jolted awake.

“He just passed out when you stuck him?” the driver asked. We made a U-turn and headed south.

“Yeah,” the soldier said. “Like a bag of bricks.”

“I hope this shit isn’t contagious,” the beanstalk said.

The twitchy guy groaned and fell over a little, pushing me hard against the door of the Hummer.

“Guys,” I said. “If I have to sit with this freak drooling all over me, the least you can do is tell me what all this C-1 and C-2 shit is.”

The driver looked at the beanstalk, who shrugged.

“I don’t know what the ‘C’ stands for,” the driver said. “But we’re collecting people on the street and giving them designators. A C-2 is someone like this guy. They’re people who’ve fallen off the monster and lived. He’s injured but not combative, or at least not aggressive toward us, and all he wants to do is to get back to the creature. It’s all he’ll talk about, and he cares more about that than his injuries. A C-1 is someone like you. They just started popping up a couple hours ago. He looks normal, but he’s also been attached to the monster. They attack us when we get close. They’re usually close to the monster when they appear, but we’re not taking any chances.”

A thin line of bloody mucous bobbed from the guy’s nose and descended onto my knee. I tried to scoot away, but I couldn’t.

“But I haven’t touched the thing,” I said. “I’m not a C-anything.”

“We know,” the beanstalk said. “But we have our orders. Where we picked you up…the reports say several people in that traffic jam got out of their cars and ran toward the monster. Not all of them. Just a few people, but enough to mire the road with abandoned cars. Our orders are to pick up anyone who might be coming back.”

We turned the corner and pulled into an elementary school parking lot. I watched as a helicopter took off from the playground. Several Hummers were parked on the road here. If I had my bearings, we were less than a quarter mile from where they had picked me up. We’d made a giant loop.

The tall soldier hopped out and opened the door. “Come on,” he said, helping me up. I tried to wipe my leg on the seat, but missed. The other soldiers grabbed Twitchy and half-carried, half-dragged him toward the double doors of the school as we followed.

I suddenly missed the twins as we were brought inside. They would’ve been so excited by this. They simultaneously loved and hated the US government. I wondered if they would’ve been surprised at how quickly this was set up.

We walked into organized chaos. Somehow the power was on, but the place looked dark from the outside. Very covert. Hundreds of masked soldiers filled classrooms, all receiving briefings while others—soldiers and people in respirator suits—ran about like extras in a virus-destroys-the-earth movie. The walls of the hallways were filled with drawings and artwork of the children who went to school here. A lot of it had fallen from the walls in the bustle, cluttering the floors.

I don’t know why, but that part bothered me, to see the soldiers walking all over the kids’ work. The soldiers in front of me continued to drag the passed-out man through the hallway, and a child’s hand turkey caught on the bottom of his dirty, bloody boot, ripping as it was towed down the hall.

The twitchy guy was passed off to a group of other soldiers, and I was turned down another hallway with the two soldiers who had picked me up. We walked through a zippered plastic wrap entranceway duct-taped to the wall, and emerged into a plastic tube that ran along the right half of the hallway.

Several older, officer-looking men rushed up and down the non-plastic tube side of the hallway, all of them talking into brick-like phones with giant antennae. None of them wore masks. Through the plastic, I heard things like, “We need more time” and “If it amoebas on us…” and lots of numbers being thrown about. The officers looked harried and afraid, which freaked me out. In all those WWII war movies, it was the soldiers who were harried and afraid, but the officers stood there and chewed on the butts of their cigars while bullets whizzed by their heads.

I was taken into the cafeteria. The tube snaked along the wall and then stopped in front of a table on the outside of the containment. The man sitting there looked like a human bulldog. The older, leathery man sported a buzz cut and scars up and down his wide, wrinkled face. He looked like the type of guy who would be typecast as an arch enemy in a straight-to-video action movie.

“A C-2, already dropped into containment and a probable Civ,” the beanstalk said.

The man at the table looked me up and down through the clear plastic.

“Where’d you get the Kevlar?” he asked.

“He also had this,” the other soldier said, holding up my automatic shotgun. “Plus he’s covered in blood.”

“Are we really going to go over this again? What would you do?” I asked. “If you weren’t in the military, and you needed to get to someone you loved?”

The bulldog stared at me for a good twenty seconds, which is a long time when you’re just standing there. I stared back at him, though it was easier through the plastic. “He’s probably a Civ,” he said. “But we better keep him in quarantine just in case.”

My heart skipped a couple beats. “Wait a second…”

“There’s no room,” the tall soldier said. “The C-1s will tear him up.”

“Then stick him with the C-2s,” the bulldog said.

“Come on,” I said. “What if those guys are contagious? Look, I gotta get out of here. You can’t keep me like this.”

“If it’s contagious, then you’re already sick,” the bulldog said. “It’ll just be for a couple hours. Probably.”

Chapter 13

They took me back down the hallway. My mind raced. The kicking and screaming on the inside started to bubble up, but I didn’t dare fight because I knew I’d be overpowered. So instead, I unleashed a torrent of cursing that would make even Nif pause.

I was taken out of the plastic-tube section of the school and into the hallway they had dragged the twitchy guy down. Two armed guards stood by a pair of double doors, and we went through and outside into the cold night.

We faced the playground. I saw a group of suited soldiers setting up a satellite disk thing right over the jungle gym. They worked silently and efficiently. In the distance, the largest helicopter I’d ever seen lowered a whole shipping container onto the open playing field.

“You really think it’s a good idea to put your base and the prisoners in the same place?” I asked.

“No,” the beanstalk said. “No, I don’t.”

We turned, passed another set of guards, and went through the double doors of a free-standing, red brick building at the edge of the playground. The sign above read “♫ The Little Theater ♪.”

More armed guards stood in the entrance lobby to the theater. As we entered, one of the soldiers walked up to us and began talking. I recognized her voice—the female driver who brought me here.

“Remember the doctor who was just here?” she said, talking to the beanstalk. “The one who was putting the IV bags in after our first run? She said she grew up here, went to this school?”

“Yeah. What about her?” the soldier asked.

“She’s gone. She just took off her respirator, walked out the door, and disappeared. Nobody knows where she went.”

“Fuckin’ A. What the hell is going on?” the soldier asked.

The driver leaned in. “The nurse says the C-2s recognized her. Like, all of them. They knew her name, even though they never saw her face, it being behind the mask and all. They just started talking to her, telling her ‘Joey’ was safe. It freaked her out.”

“We shouldn’t be here,” the beanstalk said. “This is insane.”

I had to admit, it was a relief to hear I wasn’t the only one the drones were bugging. But it was chilling, too. Whatever this thing was, it could drag away people, not just animals. I imagined this doctor didn’t walk off on her own free will, and that was disturbing. You gotta be reasonably intelligent to be a doctor. The idea of losing control, of moving and talking like a puppet, doing things one would never do…that was the stuff of nightmares.

Despite the arrival of the military, the Grinder grew stronger. It seemed every hour that passed, it gained a new ability. First, it could attach people to itself. It learned how to manipulate the attached so they acted like limbs. Then came the drones, and now it was attracting people and animals to it from afar.

I feared what would come next.

I was brought to a pair of padlocked, black double doors. More armed guards.

“We’re dropping this one off for observation,” the beanstalk said.

“He’s not a C-2,” the guard said, looking me up and down.

“I know.”

“Please don’t do this,” I said.

“I won’t forget you’re in here,” the soldier said. “Just…stay in the corner or something. I don’t think they’ll bother you.”

“What about his vest?” the guard asked.

“Let him keep it.” He grabbed my wrists and cut, freeing me from the plastic handcuffs. “He’s not going to be a problem.”

“All right,” the guard said as he unlocked the door and pulled the chain away. He had one of those I-drive-a-Trans-Am accents. “But if I catch you banging on this door, or pulling anything, I’ll have you strapped to a gurney. You understand?”

“Yeah, fuck you too,” I said.

I couldn’t see the guard’s face, but I imagined he had one of those smirking smiles and a greasy, half-grown mustache, and that he spent the weekends torturing small animals. He opened the door, revealing nothing but black.

“Where are the nurses and medics?” the beanstalk asked, peering into the room. “Why isn’t there any light?”

“After the doctor disappeared, we gave up trying to help them,” the greasy guard said. “We’re just packin’ and stackin’. It’ll be awfully crowded in there soon, too. We got a whole busload coming in fifteen.”

“Good luck,” the beanstalk said.

“Wait—” But the guard shoved me into the room.

The door slammed behind me, followed by the sound of the heavy chains being snaked and locked around the handles.

“You don’t even know my name,” I finished. How were they going to remember me, if they didn’t even know who I was?

Darkness blanketed me. All I could hear was quiet, furtive rustling. I didn’t dare move.

“Fuck,” I whispered.

I waited for my eyes to adjust. Windows… Damn. Way too small for escape. And way too high. They surrounded the large room, letting in a meager amount of starlight. Shadows moved and undulated. On the other side of the room, a red exit sign glowed. I doubted the soldiers were stupid enough to leave that door unlocked. I was tempted to go check, but as I looked around at my fellow inmates, it might as well have been across the Grand Canyon and guarded by velociraptors. I stayed put.

The room smelled of death and oil, which I recognized all-too-well as the stench of the captured. The Stepford zombie people. The C-2s.

I could tell we were in the kids’ music classroom. A small stage with a billowy curtain dominated the far wall. Piles of chairs sat stacked against the wall with the glowing exit, and rows of xylophones and drums and baritones and other musical instruments were stacked neatly against the other wall.

About twenty people wallowed on the floor in the center of the room. At first I thought they were wrestling. They held onto each other like a rugby scrum, rolling and twisting. In the dark, I couldn’t see them too well, but they were people of all shapes, sizes, and ages in various states of undress and health. They held onto each other tightly and silently, scrambling against one another, only to fall back or slip and try again. Oh God…

They were trying to emulate being in the Grinder.

They weren’t the only ones in the room. Several hospital beds lined the stage, though most were empty, and all the trays and IV lines were upended. Several people lay on the floor around the room, including one person by my foot. They all appeared dead or dying. A few leaned up against the wall, rocking back and forth.

The guy on the floor next to me twitched, and I backed away. It was the man they had picked up after me. The bearded Circle K guy.

Across the room, a man pushed at a pile of chairs, and they went clattering across the floor. He started to write something on the wall, but I couldn’t see what it was, or what he was using to write with.

I edged my way along the wall until I came to a xylophone on a wheeled stand. I pushed it forward, careful not to make it clang and bring attention to myself. I sank to the floor and pulled the instrument back toward me, which gave me a bit of cover.

I brought my knees to my chest… I am going to die in this room.

I should’ve run when I had the chance. They weren’t even trying to help these people anymore. They were just locking them up so they couldn’t refuel the Grinder. The moment these C-2s became too much of a problem, G.I. Joe would kill us all. What would happen if the Grinder turned in our direction? I had no illusions about the soldiers—they would run, and we’d be on our own, locked in this room, squished or snagged by the monster.

A wet sliding sound slurped across the tiled floor, like a heavy mop raking against Velcro. A whispered groan rose, insistent, and close.

Someone was on the other side of the xylophone, and they crawled across the floor toward me. I scrambled to my feet and pushed the xylophone away. I skittered across the wall toward the door. The instrument toppled over on the long form in the darkness, clanging. My heart was about to rip from of my chest.

The person, a large man, looked gravely injured, his blood-soaked body glistening in the dull starlight. He dragged himself by his one remaining arm, and a tangled mess of IV tubes and wires trailed behind him.

He raised his head, looking in my direction. His eyes glowed like a cat. He made another groaning noise.

I looked around the room, and everyone had stopped moving. The scrum in the middle of the room stopped being a scrum. Instead, they all crowded together, all looking at me like I was the teacher on the first day of school.

“Adam,” one of them croaked.

“Adam,” several more of them repeated. They shuffled, crawled, and lurched toward me in the darkness.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I turned around and banged hard on the double doors. “Help! Get me the fuck out of here! Help! Help!”

“Shut up!” came the muffled voice from the other side.

“Come on!” I yelled. “They’re doing something weird! Get me the hell out of here!”

A hand touched my leg, and I jumped. Panicked, I ran along the wall toward the other exit, dodging the reaching hand of another C-2. I pushed against the double doors of the emergency exit, but as expected, they didn’t open. I scrambled up onto the stage and clawed my way through the curtain. Two felt-blocked doorways led to the backstage area, and I tripped over an IV stand as I rushed through one.

Absolute darkness filled the backstage. I couldn’t see my own hands. I reached along the wall, looking for a place to hide. My hands found a light switch, and I flipped it. To my surprise, an overhead fluorescent light blinked on, filling the small backstage with a dull, yellow light.

“Adam…Adam…” I could hear them through the curtains.

Any moment, shit.

Another door stood vigil on the far wall, and I assumed it led outside. I reached it in three steps, grabbed the handle, but it was locked. Damn! The room was filled with large cases for bass drums and other instruments, and a pile of dusty black music stands lay against the other wall. Other than that, it was empty.

There was no way out.

I picked up a music stand, yanked off the top, and held it like a club, waiting for them to come into the room.

I could hear them clomping up on the stage. There were twenty, at least. What was I going to do? If I hit them, they’d feel no pain. They could overwhelm me in seconds. Despite the cold of the room, sweat poured down my face, and my slick, quivering hands had trouble grasping onto the black metal stand.

They came from both sides. Three people shouldered into the room on the left, and four more on the right. All of them were men, no, there was a girl, ten years old or so. What the…

Half of her scalp was gone, peeled back and hanging, a red, purple and white skull cap poking out on her right side. Her yellow ASU shirt was soaked red with blood. Dark rings hung under her eyes. She wore ripped jeans and only one shoe.

She stepped further into the room while the others guarded the door.

“Stay back,” I yelled. My voice cracked.

“Adam,” the girl said. “Don’t be afraid. We don’t want to harm you.”

“Listen, you little freak job… I will smash your face if you get any closer.” I meant it, too. I didn’t care if she was just a little girl. I backed up against the wall. I swung the stand overhead, hoping I looked more menacing than I felt.

The little girl cocked her head to the side, and a clump of wet—something—fell from her scalp and splattered on the floor.

“She called to you,” the girl said. “But you didn’t come. She loves you, Adam. We love you. Nif needs you.”

A man in the doorway staggered forward, clutching his chest. He fell hard to the floor, dead.

The girl looked at the dead man and looked back at me.

“You didn’t come. She needs you.”

“Stay back,” I said. My brain reeled as I parsed what she said. I meant to say something more menacing, but all I could manage was: “Nif is still alive?”

“Yes,” the girl said. “Nif is alive. Of course she is alive. She is more alive than she has ever been.”

I felt myself falter. “Can…can you talk to her for me?”

The girl frowned. “It doesn’t work like that. We can feel her, but she’s fading. They’re all fading. We need to get back to what we had, to what we must be.”

What a mind fuck this was, to hear this coming from such a small child, let alone a child with a massive head wound.

“Look,” I said. “You’re freaking me out. If you’re not going to attack me or eat me or turn me into…whatever you are, then leave me alone. I just want to get out of here…and…” I wasn’t going to tell her that I wanted to save Nif. “I just want to get away.”

“Don’t you want to see her? To feel her? To know her?” the girl said. “We can help you.”

“No offense, kid, but I don’t want your help. Not if it means I will become like you.”

“Do not worry,” she said, taking another step into the room. “Nif wants you to know it’s beautiful. She says it’s her turtle pond. All it’s missing is you.”

My mind went from fucked to gang-raped.

“Turtle pond,” I repeated. “She said that?”

“Yes,” said the girl. “We all feel it’s an apt description.”

There’s this pet shop in town Nif and I frequented for our ferret supplies, and they have this side room with dozens of aquariums and fish of all shapes and sizes. There’s this one huge tank tucked in the corner with a not-for-sale Red Eared Slider that’s always sitting half in, half out the water, perched on this little rock. Nif liked the turtle, and the pet shop turtle pond. His name was Gustavo, even though it was a she.

“Do you see that?” she said that first time we saw Gustavo.

“What?” I asked.

“She’s smiling,” Nif said, and she got a slight, Mona Lisa smile on her own lips.

“I think that’s heaven, right there,” she said. “She has everything she wants. She has food, a clean tank, and a rock to sit on, half in and half out of the water. She doesn’t worry about anything. Her first memory was probably right here, and she doesn’t even know what it means to have worry or fear.”

“Sounds kind of boring if you ask me.”

“She doesn’t even know what it’s like to be bored. Happiness is all she knows.”

Once, I suggested we try to talk the pet shop owners into letting us buy Gustavo and her tank, and Nif was aghast at the suggestion.

“Are you crazy?” she said. “How could you even think about it?”

“I don’t understand,” I said, perplexed. “I thought you liked her.”

“She already has her happy turtle pond. If we try to take her away or move her, all we can do is mess it up. All we can do is ruin it for her.”

I never mentioned it again, but now when this little drone girl said “turtle pond,” I knew it came from Nif, and I knew what she meant, how she felt in the Grinder. And for a full second, maybe two, I wanted to feel that, too.

But then I looked at the dead man on the floor and the girl with the gaping, horrific head wound. That beautiful, safe feeling they felt, that Nif felt, was an illusion. Just like the turtle pond was an illusion. It wasn’t heaven—they just didn’t know better. The Grinder had put something into their mind so invasive, so malevolent, it wiped away everything, even pain, and replaced it with a not-so-willful ignorance of everything else they’d ever known.

Randy had once asked me if I’d rather be stupid and happy or intelligent and miserable. I never knew how to answer that question until that moment, standing in the small room, holding a music stand as a weapon, facing a 10-year-old girl and her zombie posse.

I knew I’d rather have my free will. The idea of losing it scared me beyond anything else in the world.

Except losing Nif. That scared me more.

Still, I knew nothing good could come from talking to these people. They weren’t quite like how the soldiers described them, either. I wondered if there were variations to their craziness, like those who’d been attached longer were more likely what they called a C-1, and the ones who were disengaged from the Grinder accidentally were C-2s. Or maybe they were all the same, like ants in colonies with the workers and the fighters and the queen.

“We can help you,” she said again.

“I don’t want your help.”

The girl smiled, and as if on cue, all of them backed out of the room.

“It doesn’t matter. We’re going to help you anyway,” she said. “We’re going to help you reunite with Nif. Just you watch.”

I was left alone in the room with the corpse. My hands shook so hard I dropped the music stand, and it clattered on the floor.

I stood in the corner of the room for several minutes, not knowing what to do or how to react. There was a clock on the wall. It was just after three AM. On a normal night, Nif and I would’ve been asleep. I didn’t work Sundays, and I slept until mid-afternoon if I could get away with it.

A commotion broke out in the main room. I crept forward, exiting the backstage and peeking through the curtain just as the light for the entire room switched on.

“Back, back!” a pair of guards said through the open door, each brandishing their weapons. The C-2s ignored them, though none were near the door. Other soldiers brought in about ten more people, all of whom looked injured and unable to walk on their own. Each person required two or three soldiers to carry them, and they were just laid on the floor like rags.

Some of the people already looked dead and bloated. Others groaned and reached their arms into the air.

With the lights now on, I could see the wall to my left where the man had been writing something. As I feared, he’d used blood as his ink:

Come not within the measure of my wrath.

I didn’t know where that was from, but it seemed familiar.

The girl stood on the floor at the foot of the stage. She turned toward me and said, “It’s best you get down.”

At first I thought she meant Get down off the stage.

What she really meant was Get down because some of the most fucked-up shit you’ve ever seen is about to happen.

“Wha…what the?” one of the soldiers cried, dropping the legs of the body he held.

The other two soldiers, holding the same body, dropped the heavy man and scrambled further into the room. Both of them screamed, wiping at themselves.

I couldn’t see what their problem was. All three soldiers yelled and danced, as if possessed.

“Go, go, go!” another soldier screamed. The soldiers still in the room sprinted toward the double doors. The man they’d dropped blocked the doors open, and the soldiers vaulted him like a hurdle. More screaming erupted from outside the room. Shots rang out.

I glanced around at the C-2s. Had they played a mental trick on the soldiers? Made them think they were being attacked by phantoms? A soldier fell backwards into the room, waving his arms wildly. He tripped over the body in the doorway, and his mask went flying. The young man was no older than 19 or 20, and he clawed at his face with his gloved hands. The C-2s in the room just stood and watched.

Then I saw it.

One of the bodies was that of a fat, almost-naked woman who looked to be about 18 months pregnant. She wore nothing but spandex shorts and a way-too-tight shirt that covered her shoulders and exposed her pale-white and stretch-marked chest and stomach. The whole time she lay there, just twitching like her finger was stuck in a light socket.

In the horror and commotion of the room, I’d only barely registered her presence. My eyes caught her movement, and I stared. Her white stomach extended like one of those Jiffy-Pop popcorn things you put directly on the stovetop. Her skin ripped open with an audible, fabric-tearing sound.

Out came the spiders.

Chapter 14

Thousands and thousands of spiders.

They erupted from her body like a volcano, flooding the floor of the music room. So many of them that I could hear their thousands of little legs skittering and crawling on the tiles. Like a black wave, they swept forth.

They overwhelmed the soldier struggling on the floor. They covered his body in a matter of seconds, a tsunami of black on his head, his hair, and down his face, entering every cavity: nostrils, ears, and mouth. They crawled into the space between his neck and his suit, pouring into him like water. A moment later they ripped through the bottom of his suit, just above his hard leather boots.

The endless wave continued out the woman’s body. I realized she wasn’t that large of a woman, that the Grinder had filled her with the arachnids, stretching her body to its physical limits. The ultimate Trojan horse.

The other fresh bodies twitched and extended. From another man, a black burst of gnats exploded into the air, circling the air like a storm cloud and spreading out as they left the room.

Scorpions. Beetles. Ants. Lots and lots of ants—covered the floor like a carpet, more than I even thought possible, and they poured into the unseen battle outside.

I looked over my shoulder, afraid an army of bugs from the corpse backstage would emerge at any moment. None did. It seemed they all came from the newly-arrived.

From outside, screams and gunfire rose. Screams so urgent, so panicked, it was as if the very gates of hell had opened for all to hear.

I backed away, terrified. I scratched at myself even though no bugs were on me. It seemed the C-2s here didn’t want to harm me. Could I trust the bugs to leave me alone as well?

The bugs ignored the C-2s, and came no further into the room. Outside, shooting and yelling continued to echo. The torrent of insects stopped surging from the bodies, leaving ten or more desiccated shells on the floor.

The C-2s all headed toward the exit. The ones who could run, ran. The others walked, crawled, and lurched for the door. A moment later, an explosion rocked the building, staggering me off my feet. I grabbed onto the curtain, and it ripped as I fell. By the time I hit the ground, the lights in the room had blinked out.

Darkness once again washed over me.

What do I do? I didn’t want to remain in here, not in the pitch black, but I feared going outside. I would get shot. Or eaten by bugs.

Tiny bug feet crawled all over my skin, real or imagined, I didn’t know, and I scratched at myself.

I couldn’t stay here. I felt my way off stage, half sliding, half walking toward the door. I tripped over bodies, including one that wasn’t quite dead and tried to grab my ankle. I stumbled into the first room, and into a heavy, choking stench of gunpowder. The double doors to the outside lay propped by another shriveled body. Starlight filled this room with dark shadows, soldiers overcome by the bugs.

I stepped over a soldier, and I crunched on a stream of beetles. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. The dead soldier looked like the greasy guard. Looking now at his bug-ridden corpse, I felt bad for thinking so much shit about him. I kicked the surprisingly-light body out of the exterior doorway, and I propped the door open with my shoulder. I peered outside, searching for the guards I had seen earlier.

Holy crap.

Bugs coated every surface and filled the air like fog. An angry hum electrified the night, so loud I could feel it in my teeth. This was more than just a shitload of bugs. This was all the goddamned bugs in the entire world. Where did they come from? The bugs that had hitchhiked inside the people were a tiny fraction of the army before me.

This was a calculated, planned, and precise attack.

The guards had fled, and the soldiers working the satellite dish were gone. Three bodies lay on the ground nearby, like scattered action figures in a blizzard.

Black smoke and red flames gushed into the night air just outside the fence. One of the giant, double-rotor helicopters lay smoldering on its side, the body of the massive helicopter bent at a right angle. The houses all around fiercely burned.

A group of soldiers banded together on the other side of the playground, just past the improvised helipad. They stood back-to-back, shooting wildly into the air. One of them dropped to the ground, and the others fled over the fence. They didn’t make it far. They flailed desperately as the bugs overcame them.

Across the way, the door to the school sat open, and the snare-drum report of gunfire echoed from within, barely audible over the hum. Smoke poured from the building. I thought of the artwork on the walls, of the hand turkeys, all burning up.

I crouched low in the doorway as three suit-wearing soldiers burst outside. Two clutched fire hydrants, and the other held an improvised flamethrower made from what looked like a small propane tank. They were the only soldiers I had seen not panicked by the attack, and it served them well. They walked, determined into the fray, filling the air with blasts from the hydrants followed by puffs of flame. The clouds of bugs dropped all around them.

Waves of ground-crawling insects swarmed over their boots, but the soldiers stomped and ignored them.

Their chemical suits were their downfall. The suits protected them at first, until a scorpion or a wasp or group of ants, anything with stingers or pincers, tore a small hole somewhere in the fabric. Then the gnats, flies, and beetles, temporarily beaten back by the flames, swarmed anew, filling the interior of the suit of the flamethrower guy.

The soldier’s calm, matter-of-fact response was replaced by a screaming, dancing, and accidentally-flamethrowing-the-two-guys-next-to-him response. I bit hard onto my own hand to keep from screaming at the sight of the shuddering and burning soldiers.

A group of escaping C-2s fled across the schoolyard southeast, toward the Grinder. They appeared immune to the wrath of the insects.

I didn’t want to go out there. But I didn’t want to stay inside. I wondered how fast the bees and other insects could fly. Randy would’ve known. He and his brother would’ve found this awesome.

That flamethrower and tank made me nervous. It could blow at any moment, and I’d end up with a face-full of shredded metal if I stayed put. I eyed the flaming pile of soldiers. Bugs or no, I had to run.

I jumped down, and I tore around the back of the building. My shoes smashed bugs by the hundreds. It felt as if I ran upon popcorn. The flying bugs smashed against my face, getting into my hair, eyes, and mouth. Still, I didn’t get stung and bitten into mulch, which I hoped meant the bugs weren’t pursuing me.

Still, they bit some, and buzzed around me as I ran. I wondered how they were being controlled. Could the Grinder control them forever? Or would the bugs eventually stop working as one unit and go back to being normal bugs? With so many concentrated in one space, that sounded just as dangerous.

By the back fence, I found two more guards, and they both lay dead, their bodies and suits swarming with black beetles and ants. The air around us was thick with insects, but it was nothing compared to the cluster-fuck of bugs behind me.

Shit! A bee stung me right in the ear. I slapped the side of my head, flicking it off. I’d never been stung before in my life. Man, I didn’t even know if I was allergic. Either way, it fucking hurt.

Above, three helicopters descended on the school, their massive rotors kicking up swirls of black smoke, and propelling the schoolyard bugs into a flying confusion. It was a smart tactic. Just as the helicopters descended, a large group of soldiers emerged from the school, headed for their Humvees.

I jumped the fence and raced across the street. A charging Humvee almost splattered me, but I kept running. I headed north, fast, hoping the further away I got from the Grinder, the less influence it would have over the bugs.

After a good five minutes of running, I collapsed in a tired heap in an alley between a row of dark houses. My ear throbbed, but it hurt less than before. I thought about all the soldiers eaten alive. Suck it up, I told myself. I thought about how a real attack must’ve felt…the biting jaws…the stingers…and the tiny, piercing legs crawling over skin inside the clothes. I shuddered.

Behind the fence next to me, a dog whined and howled as it scratched at the wrought iron. I looked at the dog, a yellow lab. Nothing vicious about it. It just looked at me and whined, scratching again at the fence.

“You’re safer in there, buddy,” I said.

The dog barked.

I felt a crawling on my leg, and I flipped out, falling over myself to wipe the residual beetles and bugs off. A handful of bugs remained stuck in my shoes, socks, and hair. Thankfully, most were dead. I spent five minutes making sure I was bug-free.

I peed on an overturned grocery cart, said goodbye to the dog, and continued on my way.

I was a few blocks north of 5th Street—only a quarter mile from where the soldiers had originally picked me up. I decided to head back that way to retrieve the bag and get the car with the satellite radio.

Dark palo verde trees lined this neighborhood, and I tried to stay in the inky shadows. The night had become unbearably cold, and I jogged as quietly as I could to keep warm. I kept a wary eye out for any movement.

A body lay in the middle of a yard underneath a tree. I didn’t see it until I almost stepped on it. I yelped and fell on my ass.

“Wait…”

Huh? I stared at the body. It spoke again as I scrambled to my feet.

“Adam, wait…”

I paused. It was a woman, about forty years old. At first I thought she was dark-skinned, but then I saw she was soaked in blood. A trail from where she’d dragged herself in the gravel led from the neighborhood one street over.

Suddenly, a large truck with a loud diesel engine turned onto the street from down the block. Its headlamps illuminated the neighborhood, killing the shadows underneath the trees. Three more people sat nearby, appearing like apparitions. Another dragged himself along the sidewalk across the street.

“You found us,” said the woman on the ground. “You don’t have to run anymore. That’s our ride. It’ll take us home. Home to the Grinder. We’re so glad you came.”

“No way,” I said, backing away. “I’m not going to the Grinder.”

I realized this was some sort of gathering area for the ones detached from the Grinder. Like a damned bus stop back to the monster. Which meant the truck about to pull up next to me could be filled with drones.

Run. I ran around the woman and past the others, none of whom were in any condition to chase.

“That was your last chance, Adam!” she called into the night. “You were spared earlier! Not anymore!”

I turned the corner as the truck’s brakes squealed to a stop. It was an 18-wheeler with a full trailer behind it. I didn’t dare stop to look.

Chapter 15

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now as I write this down, and I’ve decided I’ve been unfair. Back in my writing class, the teacher was very specific about the definition of a story. A story is about conflict. And conflict—not always, but usually—involves bad shit. This story is no exception to that, so as a result I’m laying out all sorts of bad shit for you to read.

(By now, hopefully, you’re realizing that most of the crap they’ve been piling on you for the past six months is just plain wrong. Operation High Noon and what happened right afterwards is no exception. Fucking government cover-ups. I don’t necessarily disagree with a lot of what they did, but I hate that they don’t have the balls to tell the truth about it. We haven’t gotten quite to that part of the story yet, so I’ll leave it at that for now.)

So now I’m in the middle of telling you about all the terrible crap that happened that night and the next morning—and believe me, it gets fucking worse—and I’m adding some context and back story here and there so some of this shit makes sense. However, I’m starting to realize I’m getting pretty heavy with the bad-stories-about-Nif, and I’ve told you very little about some of the awesome things she had done, about what it was about her that made me fall so hard in love.

I’m thinking that might skew how you see her a little bit, and it’s important that you see her how I saw her. It’s important.

I can’t tell you everything. There is a lot. I could write an entire sappy, boring-ass book about how she once saved this kitten after she found it duct-taped to the road, started an internet campaign to find the asshole who did it, and got his ass arrested, but not before he was tarred, feathered, and anal-raped by a pitchfork-carrying internet posse bent on revenge.

Or I could tell you about her punk rock Smurf collection. She collected the old-school, ‘80s plastic Smurfs and spent hours painting and altering them with an Xacto knife to make little punk rockers with mohawks and chains and pissed-off expressions. She’d photograph them and put them up on eBay, selling them for tons of money. Once, she made the band KISS with Smurfette dancing in a cage. She had a stage set and everything. It took her two months to make it, and she sold the whole set for over a thousand bucks.

I liked watching her work. She’d stick her tongue out and squint her eyes in concentration. I could tell she was happy, perfectly caught up in the work, caring more about the process than the final result.

I could tell you how she named every vehicle we had, from bikes to cars. Our current vehicle, the El Camino, was named Doofus. She’d scream and swear at him when he wouldn’t start, heaping enough insults to guarantee an NC-17 rating if it were ever a movie. And when the car finally did start, she’d hug the steering wheel and apologize and say things like, “I only do it because I love you, Doofus.”

I could keep going. Instead, let me tell you more about how we hooked up.

About four months after Nif and I had sex that first time, she walked in on me crying like a little girl in the tiny break room at Big Shot Chicken. I had been sitting there for almost an hour, alone, poring over my college letters. Graduation loomed in just a few short months, and I still hadn’t made my final decision about where to go. Time was running out.

Shit, I was overwhelmed. I don’t even know why. A crushing feeling pushed in on my chest as I looked over all the possibilities, and I just started crying.

My dad had been getting sick lately, too. My mom was saying it had to do with demons. My mom occasionally said weird shit like that, so I learned to ignore it. But my dad getting sick meant he was unhappy, and when my dad got unhappy, we moved. When they moved this time, I wasn’t going with them.

They hadn’t taken care of me in years. I could’ve dropped out, flunked out, been a serial killer, and neither of my parents would care. Sometimes I’d spend the night at Royce and Randy’s or Monobrow Sam’s house, and they wouldn’t even notice I was gone.

It was the realization, not that I was going to be alone, but that nothing was going to change, that brought me to tears. I know, it doesn’t make sense. But that’s what it was.

Nif came in, saw me wipe my eyes. She sat down across from me at the table. We were still doing the pretend-it-never-happened thing.

I didn’t know it at the time, but she’d had the abortion just four weeks earlier.

She grabbed my hand.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” she said.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m fine.”

She looked into my eyes. Those goddamned brown eyes of hers took a bit of me away every time they zeroed in. “You’re a lot of things, Adam. But you’re not a liar. Don’t become one now. Tell me what’s wrong.”

I sighed. “I don’t know what to do, and it’s freaking me out.” It seemed so stupid when I said it out loud.

“With what?”

“My life.” I even told her about my parents and how I felt about them. I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t spoken of them since that time I had broken down about the tadpoles and my folks to my old lady neighbor when I was ten years old.

The whole time we talked, Nif held my hand, and stared right into my eyes. I know it’s funny, but for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel alone, and it was the warmest, happiest thing I’d ever experienced. Even when I’d thought I was in love with Samantha, I’d never felt anything like this.

“Fuck your parents,” Nif said. “And fuck whatever responsibility you have. Do what’s in your heart. In fact, you know what…” She gathered all the papers into a pile, and smacked them face down on the table. “You need to stop looking at this bullshit. Don’t even think about it until Monday. We’re going to finish our shift, and afterwards, you’re coming to my apartment. We’re going to sit on my couch, play some Nintendo, and then I’m going to cook you dinner. When was the last time someone cooked you dinner?”

“Uh…” I said. “Well, my mom…”

“Fuck your mom,” she said.

After work, I followed Nif to her apartment, a tiny little studio on the south side of town. She was 18 by now, but she’d had the place since she was 17. I never asked her how she’d pulled that off. I walked into her home, spent some time talking about all the Pee-wee Herman and Bad Brains stuff she had all over her walls, and then we sat on her ratty old couch.

“Rule number one,” she said as she put her feet up along the wall. She lit a cigarette then laid down on the couch and talked at the ceiling. “We don’t talk about college or our futures or our sad, miserable pasts. We just, you know, talk about unimportant bullshit. The purpose of tonight is to veg and chill and de-stress and not do anything or make any decisions that will impact our lives beyond the immediate.” She waved her cigarette in the air, as if it were a magic wand, and she cast a spell upon us and the evening.

“What’s rule number two?” I asked, amused.

“Don’t be afraid,” Nif said.

She stood before I could respond or even try to figure out what she meant by that.

She bowed, talking with a fake English accent. “Anyway, sir, since I don’t live in the gilded, Big Shot Chicken manager’s office, I am required to touch dead chicken as a part of my duties. As a result, I smell like a yak. I’m going to take a shower before I cook you a non-poultry dinner. Entertain yourself in any way you see fit. You’ll find my ancient Nintendo 64 has the biggest library of games you’ve ever seen.”

She turned and marched off. A moment later, I heard her shower turn on, and she began to sing “No Direction” by Bad Religion.

I thought about rule number two.

Don’t be afraid.

After a few moments of hesitation, I decided not to be. I joined her in the shower.

My legs burned as I sprinted the rest of the distance back to 5th street.

The white Volkswagen still sat on the side of the road, though now the roof had a huge dent where the soldier had landed on it. To my relief, the duffel bag remained untouched in the hedge. I grabbed it, tossed it into the car, and got in. I rolled the windows up tight in case a roving plague of bugs descended upon me. You were spared earlier. I shuddered.

I turned the key—please start—and the engine roared to life.

For several moments, I sat still, breathing, thinking about everything that had just happened. My ear ached. Above, a jet streaked through the hazy, red sky. I wondered if the military knew about the roving tractor-trailer taxis, picking up the Grinder’s orphaned drones. If they did know, I wondered if they were doing anything about them.

I could feel it. The Grinder beckoned me. Stronger than before, even though it was still far away. It was like a sixth sense pulsating in my chest. I still had my mind, my reason, but it scared me. It was getting stronger, more insistent. It felt like I stood on an uneven surface, tilting further and further sideways. I knew if I just closed my eyes and went slack, I’d fall in the direction of the monster. How soon before it became too much?

Why me? What was different about me than the soldiers, who didn’t feel this call?

Nif. I thought about the doctor who had run away, what the drones had told her, that somebody named “Joey” was safe. They had said the same to me about Nif. Since Nif was captured, and we were close to one another, the monster somehow knew me. I suspected every time it captured someone new, it got into their head, tuning into their mind like a station on the radio, broadcasting directly to your loved ones and pulling them in.

Be strong. Remember rule number two.

I backed the car off the sidewalk, and the side panels shrieked as I pulled between a truck and a fence. I maneuvered onto a side street where I had more room. I drove, wary of going too far south toward the Grinder, the bugs, and the roving semi truck.

I turned up the volume on the radio.

“…reiterated his promise not to use nuclear arms, under any circumstances on American soil,” the female radio announcer said, her voice tired and strained. “However, in light of these new developments, many are questioning this policy. Earlier, Admiral William Lexington, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had this to say:”

A new voice came on. “Certainly, we want to stop this threat without resorting to a nuclear arsenal,” said the gravel-voiced man, “especially when that threat remains within the confines of a major American city, but if this…entity splits and spreads, it is our duty to the American people and our way of life to contain it before we lose another city.”

“So,” said the interviewer. “Are you saying we’ve lost Tucson?”

“If these new reports are true,” said the Admiral, “then, yes. We’ve lost Tucson.” A long pause. “If not all of southern Arizona.”

“But what about the people still trapped in the city? We have confirmed reports of military checkpoints not only detaining, but quarantining civilians.”

“Look,” said the admiral. “We don’t know what this creature can do. We do know, however, that this…this…”

“They’re calling it ‘the Grinder.’”

“This Grinder’s influence is getting stronger as every minute ticks past. We have people, seemingly normal people, suddenly acting out in response to this contagion. Until we figure out what this is, how it’s spread, and how it can be cured, we have no choice but to quarantine anyone who may have come in contact with the infection.”

“But if we use nuclear weapons,” the reporter asked, “won’t it put these so-called quarantined individuals, many—if not most—of whom aren’t infected, in danger?”

“If we do exercise the nuclear option,” the Admiral said, “then it’ll be because we have no other…”

I couldn’t listen any more. I flipped the channel until I found more news. It took me a minute because the car’s owner didn’t have any talk stations on her presets. It was disconcerting how many stations were still playing music as if nothing was going on. I continued down the side street, heading downtown.

A male reporter spoke. “Meanwhile, the massive dual pileups, a 40-car, multiple fatality accident near Casa Grande, a town approximately half way between Tucson and Phoenix, and an even larger one just outside of Benson, has completely shut down Interstate 10. I-10 is one of only two major arteries out of Tucson. Traffic is further mired by people abandoning their cars in droves. While most of the refugees are taking to walking toward the military checkpoints, we do have reports of people turning back toward the city after learning they won’t be allowed any further.”

Another younger, male voice asked, “How can they contain so many people? Not everyone will remain on the roads with checkpoints.”

The reporter continued. “That’s exactly what’s happening. CNN is showing footage of hundreds of 4x4 trucks crossing the desert in all directions. I-19 toward Mexico is still moving, and the military has yet to stop the flow of people that way. Plus there are other, smaller state highways to and from. Listen… Pima County is over 9,000 square miles. People are going to get out. If I was stuck in the city, I’d be trying to get out, too.”

“Hell,” said the other voice, “They can’t even keep people from crossing our border up from Mexico.”

I flipped the channel again, and it was some nut screaming about the apocalypse and Jesus. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, though he reminded me of Reverend Snow, the preacher Nif had gotten tangled up with. I soon realized the rapture-and-death mindset was a running theme amongst most of the channels.

“Professor, tell us what the Hellmouth is,” another interviewer asked. “And tell us why you think it’s pertinent to the situation in Tucson.”

I paused to listen.

“Jack, I appreciate the chance to speak,” said the professor, his voice cutting in and out like he talked through a cell phone. “Depictions of the entrance of hell, the Hellmouth, were very prevalent in medieval art. Sometimes it was shown as a dark cave entrance, or a hole in the ground sucking in sinners, often with red, fiery demons at the entranceway. But sometimes, the Hellmouth was illustrated as just that—a mouth. Usually the mouth of a massive sea creature, like a whale or other nondescript sea entity. Leviathan.”

“Tucson is nowhere near the sea,” interrupted the interviewer. “But, are you suggesting that this phenomenon is related to the Christian hell?”

“Well, first off, this hell is almost universal. We’ll get to that in a minute. Secondly, while Leviathan is portrayed as a sea monster…”

I flipped the channel. I didn’t give a shit about its origins, at least not at the moment. I cared about what was really happening at the moment.

“…to make matters worse, the National Weather Service has issued a dense fog advisory for the Tucson area which will certainly hinder…”

“…reports of shooting directly into the surging crowd…”

“…of Mexico warned the United States against using nuclear weapons in such close…”

“…rang, and I picked it up, and it was her. She said she’d been captured by the monster.”

My hand froze on the radio’s controls. I stopped the car.

“She asked me to come help her.”

I stared at the radio.

Another, female reporter came on. “From far away as India there are reports of people receiving similar telephone calls from loved ones ensnared within the Grinder. All the calls are the same. A loved one calls, tells them they’re trapped, and requests help. The calls don’t last more than a few moments. The U.S. military has neither confirmed nor denied that they shut down all cellular and wire-based communications within Tucson after the first wave of calls were reported. They warned that anyone who receives such a call should assume it’s ‘an obvious and insidious trap’, that the person calling them is not doing it out of their own free will.”

So. I hadn’t really talked to Nif. It was a trick of the Grinder. Designed to get me out of the house and moving toward it. I felt sick.

Was Nif really trapped inside an armored car, sequestered and alive somewhere deep within the beast? Or was she gone already, dead and burned? Was she crushed under the mass of humanity, just another expendable, replaceable human cog?

A terrible sinking feeling welled up inside my chest.

Knowing I wasn’t unique, that others had received a call, changed everything. What little hope I had began to slip away, like water through my fingers. I wondered how many people who’d received calls were also scrambling around town, trying to save their loved ones. I wondered how many had already been caught up or killed.

A pair of dogs ran headlong across the street in front of my stopped car. I watched them disappear down the street, heading southeast. I thought of Hamlet, and I felt guilty for leaving the back door open so he could run free. I’d done it because I was afraid the house would get destroyed, and he’d be stuck. Instead, I probably got him killed. That seemed to be the theme of the evening—I couldn’t fix it, so I made it worse. I wondered if Nif would sense Hamlet if he ended up in the Grinder, if she was even still alive in there somewhere.

The twins. That was my fault, too. I could picture their mom and dad. They lived in Douglas, a couple hours away. If I managed to survive tonight, I’d have to go to them and tell them how their sons died.

I had promised Randy I’d bring the duffel bag to their girlfriend, even though I doubted the chances of her being able to help. She probably wasn’t home anyway. But I had promised him, so I had to try. I sighed and continued on my way.

I drove out of the neighborhood and into a nightmare.

As I approached the University of Arizona stadium, this time from the east, I had to cross the path the Grinder took after it had devoured the crowd at the game. The side of the stadium had cracked, and the road was torn to shreds. Buildings lay wrecked, and smoke danced into the sky from several points.

Corpses lay everywhere.

A few cars with their brights on circled the area just southeast of the stadium. A group of twenty or so people shifted through the trail of the dead, dropped like crumbs in those moments when the Grinder had grown exponentially. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it must look like inside of the stadium.

Just a few hours ago, this was a normal intersection. All these people were alive and happy, at a football game they had looked forward to for weeks. Then it ended, just like that. All in a matter of seconds.

Few people took notice as I drove across the thoroughfare. I did my best to avoid hitting any of the bodies on the road, but the Volkswagen lurched over a few arms and legs here and there. Every bump sickened me.

As I cleared the scene, I continued toward downtown, staying on the side streets, though they were less linear and more difficult to traverse. I passed Tucson High School, checking for more soldiers, though the school appeared dark. Above, airplanes and helicopters continued to circle the sky.

The Grinder was further away than ever. But I could still feel its presence. It was on the far east side of town at this point, close to my house. The radio newscasters had no contact with anybody in town, but reporters were at both the major roadblocks. The roadblock east toward New Mexico had degraded into an all-out riot on word that the Grinder was moving in that general direction. The military presence was heavy, and several people ended up shot.

Reporters warned that the flood of refugees out of town could no longer be detained. As the eastern roadblock collapsed, the northern one toward Phoenix started to buckle as well.

I listened to a tearful account from a girl who had survived the attack at the stadium. She’d been in the bathroom and somehow avoided being touched by the Grinder’s human chain. Another claimed to have seen it from an airplane in final approach to Tucson International, but the plane diverted to Phoenix’s Sky Harbor just in time to avoid the beast. He said it looked like a giant, red jellyfish from above, shimmering in the dark as it crawled across the tarmac.

I numbly navigated onto the main street and turned toward the industrial section of downtown. Random buildings around town were engulfed in flames, and I realized that it wasn’t the Grinder, but errant missile strikes. Half of Congress Street downtown burned, and with despair, I saw the row of brick buildings that housed The Nomery were destroyed and caved-in.

Nif is going to be pissed, I thought.

In that moment, I knew I couldn’t let it go. Let her go. My emotions were like a rollercoaster, moments of utter despair followed by frantic hope. Though all evidence pointed to her certain death, I still thought of her as alive, and it tore at me. The uncertainty had become like a tumor in my chest.

I had to know for sure.

Chapter 16

In the glowing darkness, I could make out the silhouette of the strange, silo-like building at the edge of the warehouse district. I wasn’t sure how to get to it. I turned down a dark street. I didn’t know if this Clementine girl lived in the entire silo, or if it was divided into apartments or what. It seemed like a strange place to live, one way or another.

This area was deserted. A few cars sat on the side of the road, but I saw no movement or life. As I crested a small hill, I could see I-10 in the distance, and unmoving lights dotted the interstate.

After a few dead ends and going the wrong way on several one-way streets, I found my way to the entrance of the tall, stucco silo sitting just south of a large, empty warehouse with broken windows. The tall building looked abandoned. It sat ominously behind a tall, wrought iron fence with an open gate. If the building had windows, I couldn’t see them. The metal gate stood amongst the tall, dead weeds. I wondered if the twins had been talking about a different place.

Then I saw the satellite dish on the side of the building. I stopped the car, and I could hear the distant hum of an engine. A generator. Maybe she was home after all.

I looked at the car’s clock. Almost 4:30 AM.

I grabbed the duffel bag and walked through the gate to the entrance. Just as I was about to knock, the door swung open. It swung outwardly, surprising me, and I had to jump back. I stared into the twin barrels of a shotgun.

The massively-pregnant woman stepped out and pushed the double barrels against my chest.

“Want to see if your bullet-proof vest can stop a pair of 12-gauge shells?” she asked. She had a thick, southern-fried accent. I remembered that voice from the Halloween party, thinking she should’ve been in a Gone with the Wind getup. Behind her, I could see a dark, curving staircase. Light glowed from the higher level, and the sound of several mewling and growling cats emanated from within.

“C-Clementine?” I said in surprise. I dropped the duffel bag, raised my hands, and talked fast. “My name is Adam. I’m a friend of Royce and Randy. We met at the Halloween party. You were dressed as a badger. I was a dog. They, the twins…they asked me to come here.”

“What’s the square root of 5,184? Answer or I’ll blow you clear back to your girly car.”

Oh crap. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I said. “How the hell am I supposed to do that in my head?”

“That’s the wrong answer,” she said. “It’s 82.”

I didn’t say anything. She took another step forward. I took a step back.

“Say it,” she said.

“Say what?”

“Say, ‘the square root of 5,184 is 82!’”

“Jesus. Take it easy. The square root of 5,184 is 82.”

“That’s a lie,” she said. “The answer is 72, not 82.”

I should’ve known someone who would date a guy with two heads would be batshit crazy.

“I swear to God,” I said. “If you fucking kill me after the night I’ve had, I’ll come back as a ghost and strangle you and your cats to death.”

She lowered the gun. “You’re not one of them,” she said. “That was a test. They can do phenomenal calculations in their head, even after they’ve been detached. They can’t stand incorrect math problems. They also know ghosts can’t strangle people or cats. Come on in, Adam. I know who you are.”

My hands shook as I picked up the bag and followed her up the narrow and steep stairs. A poster of a horse hung on the wall as I climbed.

When I’d last seen her, she was in a full-body badger suit, and I hadn’t noticed she was pregnant. I do remember Nif looking hard at her for a bit, but I just thought it was because she was making out with some dude while the party raged all around her.

Now that I was thinking about it, what was she doing with another guy, if she was supposedly dating Royce and Randy?

Clementine wasn’t unattractive, but she wasn’t a swimsuit model either, not that swimsuit models are usually about-to-blow pregnant. She had dirty blonde hair pulled back into a haphazard ponytail and that tan, leathery skin you see a lot on science-y chicks who spend tons of time outdoors. She wore stretch pants and a shirt with three wolves howling at the moon, extended over her pregnant stomach.

“This is a…bizarre house,” I said absently, looking up. The interior of the building had been converted into a giant home. Two stories of lofts ringed the tall ceiling of the silo. Her A/C bill had to be massive.

We came to the top of the stairs. She pointed me to an old, tan couch against the wall. I sat down and took in the room before me.

Royce had called her place an “evil lair.” I could see why.

The diameter of the room wasn’t that large, but it was filled with animal cages. They stacked three high in most places, and every single one contained an animal. Cats, mostly, but I saw a couple small dogs, a squirrel, and a few guinea pigs. Three Asian-style room dividers stood opposite of where I sat, and heavy, bright lights hung from the rising stairs, shining down on whatever was back there. Another divider covered what looked like an otherwise open bathroom. A small oven and an industrial-sized, double-door refrigerator sat nearby.

Every animal in every cage was going apeshit. The whole place smelled like the zoo, and it sounded like two zoos at the same time. The animals all scratched, clawed, and chewed at their cages.

The round, concave interior ceiling was painted with an image I’d seen before…a smiling dude hanging upside down by one leg from a tree. Ah. I had seen it on a tarot card. The Hanged Man.

I couldn’t see above to the top third floor, but I assumed that’s where she slept. The second floor loft had been converted into a nursery. A Noah’s ark theme was painted onto the walls around the crib, changing table, and recliner. An animal mobile hung from the loft above.

I felt guilty, seeing that.

Clementine sat next to me. She leaned the shotgun across the ottoman. “A gift from R and R,” she said of the gun. She waved at the animal cages. “They’re not normally this loud. The cats and the dogs usually run free. Do you want some lemonade? Something harder?”

I could use a real drink, but I needed my senses about me.

“No thank you,” I said. I had to raise my voice to be heard over the animals’ din. I paused. “Look, Clementine. I gotta tell you something.”

“You know,” Clementine said, interrupting. “They never told you about me because I asked them not to. Not just you, I mean. Everyone. We kept our relationship secret. It’s not because I wasn’t important.”

“I never said you weren’t important.” With everything going on, I hadn’t time to think too much about it.

“At the Halloween party,” she continued. She cradled her stomach with both hands. “That guy on the couch. The gladiator. Tim. R and R picked him out. He was going to be the baby’s father.”

“Wait…what?” Over the noise, I wasn’t sure I heard.

“Tim and I…we’re getting married. Or we were. It was the twins’ idea.”

I didn’t understand, but I could see it was important to her that I know. She was clearly uncomfortable, and felt like she had to explain herself.

“They’re dead,” I said. “Royce and Randy. They’re both dead.”

She took a deep breath and exhaled. “Are they dead, or are they within the creature?”

“They’re dead. Really dead.”

“Well,” she said, rearranging herself on the couch. “Well.”

I lifted the heavy duffel bag, and I placed it on the cushion between us. “They wanted me to bring you this.”

She unzipped the bag and peered inside. “They called me, you know. Just before the phones went out. They wanted to come get me. I told them not to. I told them I would take care of myself.” Her lower lip quivered as she talked. Having to shout the words made everything even more awkward than it already was.

She pulled the gas mask from the bag and set it aside. She retrieved the smaller bag and dropped it heavily on the ottoman. Out of nowhere she produced a huge, Rambo knife and used it to cut the zip tie to unlock the zipper.

From the small bag, she pulled a single gold brick. She had to use both hands to get it out.

“Holy shit,” I said. “Is that real?”

She nodded. “A little more than 27 pounds of solid gold.”

No wonder the bag was so heavy. “What…how much is that worth?”

“It depends on today’s value of gold, but I guess it’s around $600,000 or so. Probably more after tonight. R and R have been worried about the US currency collapsing, so they’ve been putting their money into gold and bitcoins. I didn’t know they had this just sitting around.”

“Damn,” I said. I had no idea they had that sort of money. I mean, I guess selling guns could be profitable, plus they made some serious bank from being on television, but…holy cow. This was more money than I’d ever seen in one place at one time in my life.

Clementine pulled something else from the bag. A stuffed elephant.

She placed it down next to the gold bar, and she stared at it for a long time.

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me everything.”

I told her, starting with the roller derby. I told her about the stadium. About going to the twins for help and about how they wanted to come to her for help.

I told her how they died.

I continued, talking about getting captured by the military. I even told her about Nif, and that tug at my chest, pulling me toward the Grinder.

She sat quietly as I talked, staring up to the loft with the crib and clutching onto the stuffed elephant. She squeezed it so hard her knuckles turned white.

After a moment, she stood.

“Follow me.” She dropped the stuffed animal and walked behind the divider with the bright lights. I followed.

Behind the screen and under the fast-food warming lights lay a dead, naked man. An elderly black man, strapped to a table. His chest was peeled open, like in the movies where they’re giving somebody a heart transplant. Oh. And he was headless. His head sat upside down on another table, in a clear, plastic salad bowl. His large, bulging eyes stared at me, as if he were still alive.

On a third table next to the man lay a small, pissed-off dog, strapped down. It wore a black muzzle, and it growled and snapped as we approached.

The whole area smelled like Lysol and shit.

“Well,” I said, taking it in. I looked over my shoulder, memorizing the path toward the exit. “This is pretty fucked up. Yep.”

“You said you can feel the creature,” Clementine said. She leaned against the table with the severed head, pushing aside a big microscope connected to the computer with cables. “I feel it, too. I was on my way to campus when it happened. I was meeting up with Tim after the game. I got there in time to see that monster crawl out of the stadium.” She nodded toward the man. “This guy, apparently, had been attached to the thing for hardly a couple minutes. He tried to steal my truck. He kept apologizing as I fought with him. He said he had to ‘get back.’ I stabbed him in the chest with my knife.”

“What’s up with the dog?” I asked.

“Lieutenant Starbark,” she said. “Tim’s puggle. I had her with me, and she’s normally the most gentle, submissive dog you’ll ever know. But right now, she’s more manic than the others.” She paused. “It’s how I knew Tim was ensnared. She can feel him.”

She looked at me. “I can feel it, too.” She tapped her chest. “Right here.”

“I want to get her back,” I said. “I was hoping you could tell me how.”

She shook her head. “The closer you get to that thing, the stronger that feeling will be. You’ll end up like this dog.”

“But…have you learned anything? Anything that will help me?”

She nodded. “Take a look in that microscope.”

I looked through the dual eyeholes. A bunch of pulsing tributaries filled the round scope like a lightning-filled sky.

“I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

She pushed the microscope aside and hit a few keys on the keyboard. Several numbers on a 3D graph popped up. She motioned at the headless corpse on the table. “You were looking at this guy’s skin. Your nervous system takes up a lot of real estate in your body, but this guy here is over-packed with neurons, the wires of the system. When I say over-packed, I mean every square millimeter of space inside of him is filled.”

“So the twins were right,” I said. “They said it connects to the nervous system and hacks the brain.”

“That’s exactly what it does,” she said. “It first takes over the existing system, that much is clear, and in a matter of moments, it appears to fill the body with a secondary, parasitic nervous system that’s networked into the central brain.”

“But, how can it grow so fast? It barely touches someone, and bam, they stop moving.”

“I don’t know how the nerves grow so fast. The aliens engineered it that way, and with time, I’ll figure it out. As for connecting so fast. That I have figured out.”

Aliens…? I wasn’t going to go there. I remembered the twins had said she was a bit whacked out, and it had cost her the job at the university.

A couple clicks of the mouse, and she showed me another chart that looked like complete gobbledygook to me. I could tell she was meant to be a teacher, by the way she reverted into information mode. I wondered if she felt vindicated, even just a little bit, by the appearance of the monster.

“A square inch of a normal person’s skin has over 1,000 nerve endings. All it takes is a single nerve to come into contact with a signal from the monster’s system, and a person’s network is…hacked, as you call it, at the speed of light. After the connection immobilizes the host, the nerve cells shore up the connection point and the secondary system invades the body, growing alongside the existing nervous system. All this takes place in fraction of a second, allowing the monster to grow exponentially when it encounters a large crowd.”

She pointed a pen at a section of ripped skin on the upside-down human head. “The connection is so strong, the part that disconnects usually is the area around where the nerves are attached, but not the direct connection point. That’s why all the involuntary disconnects—the C-2s they’re calling them—tend to have a limb or other chunk of their body missing. The connection point can change, too, all in an instant. They may look like they’re walking up the side of the creature like a fly on a wall, but the moment their hands and feet touch, they’re physically attached for that one second.”

She held up a glass jar of pinkish goo that looked like a bit of brain. “This was inside of him,” she said, pointing at the open chest cavity of the man. “It’s a neural junction. Like a repeater. Some large dinosaurs had them in their pelvises to help move the lower half of their body. If this guy was at the game, and I think he was because he had a U of A shirt on, then this grew inside of his body in less than five minutes. With this, in theory, he could still be controlled even if he was otherwise dead.”

I told her about seeing headless corpses crawling the outside of the creature. Of how the C-1s brought their dead back to the monster, but ignored the unaffected dead.

Clementine nodded. “That makes sense. The system needs to be alive or pre-wired for it to be able to take over. But it sounds like the dead still need physical contact with the central parasite to work. At least for now.”

I looked at the gooey, pink nerve bundle in the jar. That was inside of Nif? Just getting her away wouldn’t be enough, if part of it went with her. If an entire, alien brain lived within her, how could I ever save her?

“What about all these assholes who are running around now, fighting for the monster? They’re detached. And what about this?” I pounded on my chest. “How is it calling to me? How does it know who I am?”

“When the system takes over the body, it starts with the brain. My hypothesis, and it’s only that, is that taking over a brain takes a little bit longer. But once it does, the person who used to be, is gone forever. The new self is immersed into the communal brain. It integrates with your existing brain when it’s outside the hive, but it stops using your original nervous system. The C-2s are only partway there. The C-1s are fully transformed.”

“Fuck,” I said. “Like the Borg from Star Trek.”

“Sort of,” she said. “Furthermore, I believe when they’re physically attached, each node has both send-and-receive access. So someone that gets snatched up will learn everything about everybody else on the network. It’s like they’re all sharing one giant brain, and it gets stronger and smarter every time they add someone else. It’s why they can do the fast calculations. It’s why the whole thing will look like it’s moving in one direction and then suddenly veer off in another. It’s because it just picked up someone and learned something new.”

“Wait. How did you learn about this stuff? Can’t be from this dude on the table. You said you killed him right away.”

She pointed at the small TV sitting in the room. It was turned off. “Satellite still works. They phone interviewed Dr. Clarence Ingles, a bigwig researcher at UMC before we all lost telephone reception. They took in a wave of the injured after the attack on the stadium, and he noted the calculations, inability to lie about math equations, and ability to psychically receive messages. Since then, others have noted the intense, almost instinctual pull people have toward the creature. At first, only those with close connections to the ensnared feel it.”

She flipped on the TV. It showed a scene from the stadium from the point of view of the camera on the field. I looked away.

“But now, all animals within a certain radius are being pulled in. I’m afraid it’s going to start in on all humans, too, and that radius is going to get bigger and bigger.”

“How can I save her?” I asked.

Clementine looked at me for a long a moment. “R and R were right about you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Adam, you can’t save her. At least, I don’t know how. Even if she is alive, even if you manage to get her away, she’s been transformed in such a fashion that she’ll never be the same. She’s no longer your wife.”

Fear pulled at me. “We don’t know that for sure. I have to try.”

I realized the animals in the room had calmed somewhat, but the feeling in my chest was stronger. It’s coming this way.

The news now showed a large, crashed military cargo plane, burning in a field. The headline underneath: Shot Down?

She sighed. “We’ll need to shield you.”

It took me a moment to realize she was saying she would help. “Really?”

She looked around the room. “With the right supplies, and the right clothes, we could probably protect you from being ensnared. If you wear something that completely covers you, the hive’s nerve endings won’t find purchase. Still, I don’t know how to defend you from bombs or from the mental pull it has on you. Or from being squashed like a bug.”

I felt like an asshole asking, but I asked anyway. “One of the twins told me you sleep with something on your head, to protect you from alien brain waves.”

She nodded. “A velostat and lead-lined helmet. It doesn’t work in this case. I’ve already tried it.”

“Then I’ll just have to fight it,” I said. “And avoid getting shot.”

“And blown up. And burned. And then what happens after you get close to the monster?” Clementine asked. “You going to ask nicely, ‘pretty please would you let my wife go?’”

The television now featured a blurry, cell phone video of the Grinder as it scuttled down the road toward the airport. The time stamp said it was about twenty minutes after it hit Arizona Stadium. The creature took the form of a massive, sideways-walking crab. The video zoomed in on a group of three obviously-dead bodies, including a boy no older than eight. The bodies fell off the monster, and a tentacle swiftly snatched them back up. The video followed the three corpses as they lay motionless on the top of the beast. After a moment, all three twitched and then climbed off in opposite directions.

“I know how desperate and stupid this is,” I said.

“All right, then,” she said. “We gotta get you a dry suit, socks, and something to protect your head.” She grabbed her keys off the counter. “We need to go now.”

“No,” I said. “Just help me figure out what I need, and I’ll get it alone.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Just because I’m pregnant doesn’t mean I can’t help.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “Look… Randy, before he died, he made me promise that I’d talk you into leaving the city. He said you wouldn’t go.”

“Damn straight I’m not leaving,” she said. “If I leave, who is going to take care of my animals?”

“No one is going to take care of them if they nuke Tucson. They’ll die. You’ll die.”

“I don’t think they’ll nuke. And if they do, we’ll have warning.”

I shook my head. “They may have promised they’d warn us, but if I’ve learned anything in the past few hours, it’s that the military is getting their asses handed to them. They’re not going to warn us or wait for us to evacuate, not when that thing can read our minds. It could happen at any moment.”

She didn’t respond.

“Clementine,” I said. “I don’t know you, but I know Randy and Royce liked you a whole lot. You were very important to them. And I don’t know what sort of deal you had going with this Tim guy, but I do know the twins—my friends—cared about you and that baby enough to sacrifice their lives to come help you. I know your animals are important, but you’re all that baby has. Please get out of town as quickly as you can.”

“They were dying.”

“What?”

“Royce and Randy. Their body couldn’t handle it anymore, and it was slowly shutting down on them. They had to get dialysis three times a week, their liver was shot, and their lungs could no longer handle the workload. They had a year, maybe two to live. That’s why they wanted someone else to raise their baby. Tim—he went to school with them, and they knew he liked me. They knew he would be a good father.”

Tears streamed down her face.

It made sense, then. I remembered a conversation I’d had with Randy and Royce about six months ago, not long after Nif’s hospital stay. They’d asked me about my father.

“When your dad died,” Royce had asked. “Did you remember mostly the good things or the bad things?”

My dad had been dead for a few years, and I still thought about him all the time. While I had plenty of decent memories, the bad outweighed the good by about a bajillion to one.

“The bad things,” I answered. “Mostly. But my dad was an asshole.”

“That’s what I thought,” Royce said.

“But,” I said, “more than anything, I remember visiting him the night before he died. We sat and talked for hours. We talked more that night than we ever had. I hated seeing him dying like that. And why he died, that fucked me up quite a bit. So, despite everything, I remember the sadness I felt more than anything. He was an asshole, but I miss him all the time. I feel cheated, that he was gone too soon.”

That was the end of it.

Clementine seemed to be wavering. I pressed on. “The twins may have been dying, but that doesn’t change what they felt, or how they acted when it came to you. This baby is all they have left in this world. Now that they’re gone, it’s the only mark that they’ve made on the future.”

That did it. “I…I can go to their parents’ house. It’s in Douglas.”

A massive relief washed over me. “Their folks are nice people. They’ll keep you safe as long as it takes.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She produced a yellow legal pad and a pen. “But first, let’s get your shit figured out.”

Chapter 17

Twenty minutes later, I left her silo with an impossible plan. I carried the duffel bag, now containing the gas mask, a few canister refills, the giant Rambo knife, the glass jar containing the neural transmitter, and a plastic bag filled with syringes and bottles of medicine. She’d offered to let me take the shotgun, but I declined. Without the knife, it was the only weapon she had. She owned a big, white mobile veterinary clinic van, and I left her filling the back with her animal cages. I offered to help, but she pushed me out the door.

“Goodbye, Clementine,” I said as I left.

“Once you and your wife get away from the monster, come down to Douglas,” she said, smiling meekly.

“I’ll meet you there tomorrow afternoon,” I said.

We stared at each other for a few seconds, each of us pretending like Nif and I really would show up at the twins’ parents’ house the next day. She raised her hand and went back to taking the cages out her back door.

I thought of my own parents. If they were still around, would Nif and I had gone there? Probably not. Nif had never gotten along with my parents.

My dad died when I was 19 years old, two months after Nif and I were married. It was a long, painful death, and for weeks the doctors were at a loss as to what it was that was eating him away from the inside.

“It is the demon,” my mother said. “It has lived within him for a long time, and it now wants to find a new home.”

It’s funny. My mother was around me my entire life, but I have so few memories of her from my childhood. She rarely spoke. She acted more like my father’s maid than anything else. People used to ask me, only half jokingly, if she was a mail-order bride. I would say no, but the truth was, I had no idea. I never knew how they met. They barely interacted with one another, and it wasn’t until I was older did I realize how abnormal that was.

Around the time I was 17 years old, it turned out, my mother started the long process of killing my father by poison.

Scopolamine, it was called, some urban legend date rape drug. She’d put tiny amounts in his food every night, she’d claimed, in order to make him sleep better and so he wouldn’t drink and then beat me or try to steal my money from my new job, which she knew I was saving for college.

That excuse was bullshit. Yeah, my father was an asshole. He was cruel to me. He made promises he never kept. He never taught me anything, other than how to be bitter and how to fend for myself.

But he never laid a hand on me. Not once, not even when I deserved it.

She continued to poison him long after I had moved out. And despite everything I ever thought about my father, I could never, would never, forgive my mother for what she did.

They had moved to Phoenix after I graduated high school, and I’d remained in Tucson. Her murder trial only lasted three days. Nif and I attended, sitting in the back. I sat there, numb with rage at my mother through the trial, Nif clutching my hand the entire time. Those three days were a blur.

I’m not even sure why I was so angry. If he’d died another way, like in a car accident, everything would’ve been different. I think I was most angry that she used me as the excuse, and that the defense clung meekly onto that excuse during the trial.

She was found guilty, and to this day, she rots in an Arizona state prison. The last time I saw her was when they led her out of the courtroom. Even then, her face betrayed no emotion. She didn’t even look at me.

I rubbed my eyes. It was just after five AM, and dawn would soon break. A thick, misty fog descended on Tucson, like the spirits of all who had died had come together to form one specter that encircled the entire city in its ghostly embrace. I couldn’t see more than twenty feet ahead. I could hear the rumble of airplanes, but I looked for their lights, and I saw nothing.

I climbed into the Volkswagen, flipped on the lights, and headed out.

I drove, but here in the industrial section of town, I saw no life. I turned on the radio, but I heard nothing new. The monster still roamed. The evacuees slipped through, and those who didn’t, rioted. Experts were clueless. A seven-year-old ‘prophet’ in Croatia claimed to know what was going on. None of the theories on the radio came close to Clementine’s explanation of the Grinder. Rumors swirled about military infighting. More and more people called for the nuclear destruction of southern Arizona, and they couldn’t understand what was taking so goddamned long.

I turned the radio from the news, and I found a station playing U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name.” I turned it up, and I sang along.

Nif hated U2. She hated almost all music, except that narrow group of punk bands she grew up listening to and a few other random genres, like surf and rockabilly. She’d get irritated if I ever turned on the radio at all, since they rarely played anything she liked. I understood and accepted that, and after a while, I found myself listening to music I knew she liked, even when I was alone. I did the same when I dated Samantha.

Irish faggots, Samantha had called U2 when she saw the CD in my backpack. As crass as Nif was, she was more diplomatic. She’d called them “cabbage-eating pig fuckers,” when I’d mentioned I liked them.

But now as I drove, I sang—loud—and, for the first time in a very long time, I felt not an ounce of guilt.

My destination was the scuba shop in the shopping center by my work. It wasn’t far, but abandoned cars littered the road like discarded toys. At one point, I crossed over an area previously traversed by the Grinder. No bodies lined the street, but a 100-meter wide smear of red painted the road where the beast had passed. The dark, cratered houses on either side of the foggy street revealed the absolute destruction wrought by the monster.

Distant fires continued to roar, registering as a slight glow in the fog. When I rolled down the window, I could smell it, heavy on the air.

I did see a few people here and there, scuttling away at the sight of my car. One was a C-2, legless and unable to move. The girl was no more than 16, and she pulled herself forward along the road, trailing guts. She raised her hand as I passed.

Before I left, Clementine gave me a shot in my arm. She said it was vitamins, and it would help somewhat with the urge to go into the Grinder. At the time, I suspected it was a placebo, especially since she’d already admitted she couldn’t stop the urge herself. But it did seem to work a bit. I felt the Grinder, looming in the invisible distance. I felt it as sure as I felt my own hands. But now that I had a plan, the urge to blindly suicide like a bug into a zapper diminished.

Fifteen minutes later, I pulled into the mostly-empty parking lot by my work. A Safeway, a cluster of fast-food restaurants, and several boutique stores stood in a line. The Safeway was normally open 24 hours, but they had closed the doors only to have them ripped open by mobs earlier in the evening. The foldout doors hung like broken teeth in the grocery’s entranceway. Upturned shopping carts and cans of food littered the lot. The car jumped and bumped over the scattered and discarded food. As I passed, a group of three people burst from the store pushing a shopping cart full of cereal. They disappeared into the mist.

The scuba shop sat at the end of the line. A red and white diver down flag hung limply on a pole above the shop. I never paid much attention to this place, even though I saw it every single day. I always thought it was strange that a town like Tucson would have so many dive shops, since there was nowhere nearby to scuba dive.

To my relief, it looked as if the door hadn’t been smashed in. I parked the car in front, and I stuffed my keys and the knife into the loop on my Kevlar vest. I’d never been scuba diving before. I barely knew how to swim. Clementine insisted that a particular type of suit they’d have would be just what I needed, and she told me what to look for.

“Here we go,” I muttered.

I picked up a discarded can of beets, and I threw it as hard as I could at the large glass window. The can bounced off and scattered away. I swore, picked up a rock, and tried again. This time the window shattered, crashing louder than I thought it would.

The glass crunched under my shoes as I climbed inside. I was to grab not a wetsuit, but a dry suit, with a particular type of neck seal. Plus waterproof socks and cleated boots, gloves, and a dive hood. I fumbled through the dark store, wishing I had a flashlight. I could feel time slipping away as the red glow of impending dawn seeped through the fog.

Finally, I found what I needed, and I put on the black and blue suit over my clothes and the Kevlar. It was hot as fuck, and I imagined I looked like a deranged racecar driver. The seal at the neck felt funny, all tight around my Adam’s apple, like I was sticking my head up through something I shouldn’t. I found an ankle sheath for the knife, and I stuffed the hood and gloves into a hip pocket. The dark store felt unsettling and unwelcoming, like being in an unfamiliar basement with the lights out. I got my ass out of there as soon as I could.

I doubted this outfit was any better protection than just a couple extra layers of clothes, but it was better than nothing. Clementine had recommended this or a firefighter’s outfit, and we’d both decided this would be better and easier, since I was traveling this way anyway.

The Grinder loomed in the distance. I couldn’t see it, but I felt it, just a few miles away, getting closer by the moment. I climbed back into the car.

I realized I did need a flashlight. It wasn’t on my list, and I hadn’t thought to bring one. But I needed one, I knew where one was, and it was right next door.

Chapter 18

My work. Big Shot Chicken.

Yes, after six years, I still worked at the chicken place.

I pulled around back into my regular spot next to the dumpster. Garbage lay strewn over the lot, and under normal circumstances, I’d be pretty pissed. Jeremy and Nan closed last night, but closers on a Saturday worked till 1 A.M. and by then, the power and phones would’ve been out for hours.

I’d first gotten hired at Big Shot when I was 17 years old. It seemed like a lifetime ago. I was a different person, that 17-year-old walking into the front door to fill out an application. It was the day after Samantha had dumped me. I’d planned on working there through the end of high school, and maybe through the summer before college. It’s funny, how plans slip through your fingers. You can’t point at one thing and say, this is what happened, this is why things didn’t turn out.

It’s never that simple.

I don’t want you to think I’m ashamed of working fast food. I’m not. I’ll never be ashamed of it. It was a real, legitimate job, and I was good at it. You’re supposed to hate jobs like this, but I didn’t. I liked working here. No, it didn’t pay all that great, but I was assistant manager, and I made more money than many people thought. Plus, I had health benefits, and I didn’t stay up at night stressed out over reports and presentations like some of my cubicle-chained friends.

Still, I avoided telling people my occupation unless they asked. They were ashamed for me, and they were embarrassed that I wasn’t embarrassed. To them, working here while everyone else my age was becoming engineers and lawyers and moving to different cities to get their own offices meant I had failed somewhere along the way. They were embarrassed and ashamed and better than me. I’d get that look, especially from the assholes I went to high school with. The look that said, I thought you were a geek. I thought you went to college.

What did you do to ruin your life?

That seemed to be a common theme. Everyone around me kept thinking, hinting, and flat-out saying I was squandering away my life. With Nif. With my job.

But I was happy. What was wrong with that? Why couldn’t that be enough?

I didn’t have my keys to the restaurant, but I had a set hidden inside a fake rock by the back entrance. I picked them up, and I jammed them in the door only to find it was already unlocked, which didn’t surprise me. Jeremy often forgot to lock this door on the best of nights.

Not for the first time, I thought about all that had happened in this place. The place where Nif and I first had sex. Where we’d fallen in love. I knew every square inch of this building, and I could run the entire restaurant by myself if I had to. (And I did have to from time to time. That was the price of having teenagers as employees.) This was the only job I’d ever had.

Like I said, it had been six years, full-time for almost five. Though I’ve never sat down and done the math, I’m pretty sure I spent more time in this restaurant than in any other building in my life, including any homes I’d had. In many ways, this stupid place was more my home than anywhere else in the world.

The kitchen was trashed, and the freezer hung open, revealing people had actually stolen 250 pounds of raw chicken. Pieces of one of my Rubik’s Cubes lay scattered across the floor. The manager’s office door had been kicked off its hinges, and I fought the temptation to check if the safe was broken open, too. The floor was covered in oil and flour, and the place stunk like rotting buttermilk, grease, and mayonnaise.

To my relief, what I came for still remained in the kitchen, hanging with the other utensils over the sink. I grabbed the cheap flashlight. It was for checking the grease trap at closing time, though it rarely got done. I switched it on—dim, but it worked. I tossed it in the bag and turned to leave.

Four people blocked the exit.

I recognized all four of them. They were skinhead punks, roller derby regulars, guys I had seen more than once at parties, though none of them I would consider friends. In any group of people, there were sub-cliques and inner circles. The Tucson punk scene was no different. Even within the skinheads, there were several distinct groups. Most were cool guys who weren’t the mouth-frothing, neo-Nazi racists people made them out to be. In fact, most of the skinheads I knew hated the racist connotations associated with the skin subculture.

These four, however, all belonged to the mouth-frothing contingent, which was why I didn’t know them that well. They made me nervous during the best of times. These guys were the type who hung out in the backyard at parties, drinking beer, picking fights, smoking weed, and talking about how they’d one day take over the world when they barely knew how to take care of themselves.

One was enormously fat, and he wore a white T-shirt with red suspenders. People called him Hippo. I didn’t know the other guys’ names. Each carried a baseball bat, like they thought they were those assholes in A Clockwork Orange.

All four of them advanced on me. I took a step back. My foot splashed in the oil. I regretted not taking Clementine up on her offer of a shotgun.

“I knew you’d be here,” Hippo said. “Everyone else is staking out your house or Peach’s place, but I said to my colleagues here, isn’t he that Jew faggot who works at the chicken place? Nobody’ll think to look there. He’s probably there now guarding the safe because he’s a cock-gobbling kike.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I’m not Jewish, you racist cunt. I’m half Filipino.”

“You know, I never liked you,” Hippo continued. “There’s always been something off about you. Your wife, she’s hot as fuck for a half spic, but you…you always act like you’re better than us, you conceited piece of shit, holding your nose up in the air like a fucking faggot.”

If you’ve never been hit in the head with a baseball bat, I recommend that you call in sick the day it’s supposed to happen. This was the second time in my life I’d been smashed in the temple with a bat (the first being an accident in the first grade that had bought me a night in the hospital and a mess of stitches.) Neither event was pleasant, this one more notable in terms of extreme, excruciating, I’m-going-to-die pain. In the instant it took to register that the guy next to Hippo was playing piñata with my head, and the actual moment the bat crashed into my skull, I hoped that I would either: A) Die, or B) Get instantly knocked out.

Unfortunately for me it was C) falling-to-the-ground, wondering-if-my-skull-had-been-fractured-while-I-puked-my-guts-out.

My memory of the moment immediately after is a bit fuzzy, but I think I said something like, “Gah, what the fuck, man? Gah.” I sat up, my dry suit covered in cooking oil, flour, and puke. I had to blink several times to see straight. It didn’t seem like any bone was broken, but the side of my head felt like it would pop from the pressure, like a car had parked right on top of it. I put my hand at the wound, jerking it away in pain. Again, I felt sick to my stomach.

“Don’t fucking move,” Hippo said. “He only hit you with half force. Next time he’ll crack you open like a Jewish watermelon.”

At first I had thought they were doing this because they were a new kind of drone, but I was beginning to have my doubts.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “I don’t have a problem with you guys.”

“He’s on his way,” one of the guys said, putting a device in his pocket. Couldn’t have been a cell phone. It had to be a sort of walkie-talkie.

“You fuck with one of us, you fuck with all of us,” Hippo said.

I realized, then, what these assholes were on about.

“This is about Scooter?” I said. “Are you kidding me?”

“The government has collapsed,” Hippo said. “Our time has come. Scooter told us how you jumped him and stole his truck. The new world order requires us to take care of our own, to set examples of those who don’t follow the rules. Our rules. And rule number one is: Don’t fuck with our friends.”

I shook my head. “The government hasn’t collapsed, you moron. If you had half a brain, you’d take your fat ass as far from this place as possible. This entire city is toast, along with everybody inside.”

The one who had hit me jabbed the bat in my direction. “Oh, yeah, smartass? Then why are you still here?”

My head throbbed. I feared if I tried to stand, I wouldn’t be able to.

“Did Scooter tell you why I took his truck? My wife was one of the ones taken at the bout. He offered to help me, and then he pussed out. I had to take it.”

“That’s not what he says,” Hippo said. “He’s nearby. He’ll be here soon.”

“I don’t have time for this bullshit,” I said. The closest edge of the Grinder was a mere two miles away. Past the pain in my stomach and head, I could sense the pull in my chest again. The fourth guy in the group continually looked over his shoulder, toward the outside. I eyed him closely. Yes. I could see it in him.

He felt it, too.

“What’s the combination to the safe?” Hippo demanded.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. None of this was funny, but I laughed all the same. All of their talk about changing the world, all the plans they’d been making for years—and the first thing they clamored for in their supposed anarchist new world order was the single biggest symbol of the government they reviled: the almighty dollar.

“There’s probably a hundred bucks in there,” I said. “If you’re lucky.” If Jeremy and Nan had closed the store properly after all the shit started, there’d actually be five or six grand, maybe more. But I doubted any of it was left, not after the chaos from earlier in the evening. Three shift managers along with the store manager and district manager all knew the combination. I wouldn’t be surprised if any one of them had come back here and raided the safe before skipping town.

“I didn’t ask you how much is in there. I asked you to tell me the combination, faggot.”

I sighed. I told him.

“Dale, go open the safe.”

One of the guys—Dale—nodded and went into the office. He came out a minute later, saying I gave them the wrong numbers. I swore at him, called him an idiot, and he went back to try again and got it open.

“It’s empty,” Dale said.

“I guess you’ll have to start your new world order without being financed by corporate chicken,” I said.

“Shut your Jew mouth,” Hippo said.

I touched my head again. Ouch. Still tender. In a couple hours—if I lived that long—the side of my head would be swollen like a water balloon.

Dale said, “Where’s Gobo?”

I looked up and saw the four were now three. The missing skinhead was the one who seemed affected by the Grinder. No way he would come back. Outside, the fog was as thick as ever, but dawn had embraced the world, and everything glowed orange. The Grinder was still about two miles away, moving parallel with our position. I no longer heard airplanes overhead, which I took as an ominous sign.

“The fuck? Gobo! Gobo!” Hippo said, looking around. “Go find him,” he said to Dale, who went outside.

“You know,” I said, “the first thing I did when I got in here was check the safe. I’m really surprised you let Dale go in there alone.”

“What’re you talking about, fag boy?” Hippo asked.

“I was lying when I said there was only a hundred bucks in there. There had to be at least ten grand. Saturday night is our busiest time, especially with a football game. Think about it. It’s all in a blue bag, small enough to stuff down your pants.”

Hippo and bat boy looked at one another.

“And now that your friend is outside in the fog,” I continued, “he’s got all sorts of opportunities to hide that money. Or maybe he won’t come back at all. Or maybe he and Gobo are in this together.”

“We’re not retards,” Hippo said. “Your Jew mind tricks won’t work on us.”

“Maybe…maybe I’ll go out and look for them,” bat boy said.

“No,” Hippo said. “You stay with me.”

I shook my head. “Ten thousand dollars. You know, if it was my plan, I’d probably have it all worked out. I bet Dale comes back, saying he couldn’t find Gobo. But what he really did was pass the bag off to him, you know, to make it look less suspicious.”

“Shut your fucking mouth,” Hippo said, raising the bat above his head. He paused as two people walked into the restaurant.

Dale and Scooter.

“Gobo is gone,” Dale said. “He’s disappeared. But look who I did find.”

Scooter walked right up to me, pushing past the other two, his shoulders square, trying to look big. He got real close in my face. His nose was swollen, and he had the beginnings of dual black eyes. Geez. Had I hit him that hard?

“You look like you got the tar beaten out of you,” I said.

“Where’s my truck?”

“I tried to fuck your mom with it, but I couldn’t get enough traction,” I said. “Still, I’m pretty sure she liked it.”

I don’t know what had gotten into me. I think I was in so much pain, and I was so scared and tired and frustrated that I just didn’t give a shit anymore. Earlier, I had been so fearful of being cowardly, of running when others needed me. That was gone. Even Scooter looked taken aback. His surprised look evolved into a mask of unadulterated rage, and he slapped me hard across the face. His hand smashed right below where I’d been hit with the bat, and little bright lights of pain exploded in my vision.

He pulled a pistol out of his waistband and stuck it against my head. The cold metal of the barrel stung where it pressed against the massive bruise at my temple. I remembered what the twins said about the Glock they had sold him. It contained a clip filled with blanks, but there might be one bullet in the chamber.

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.

Chapter 19

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.

“Out,” I said to everyone, grabbing the duffel. I threw the bag over my neck and pushed my seat forward for Michelle and her son to get out. Uri jumped out his side, cursing and stomping the mice and fire.

A huge building with a chain-link fence and a massive, empty parking lot stood to our right. A trailer park spread into the fog on the other side of the street. As I watched, twin monster cats pounced on the roofs of trailers. One collapsed through the roof, breaking apart as it fell. Screams and gunshots filled the park.

We rushed along the fence, running west. Uri held onto the boy, and Michelle ran alongside. Without a car, we were fucked. We came to the end of the street as screams and gunshots surrounded us. The city that had seemed so empty at night was now awake. The creatures forced the hidden from their homes. The mini-monsters stalked through the neighborhoods near the Grinder’s path, herding people like sheep to feed the insatiable monster.

And we were right in the middle of it.

Chapter 20

There was nowhere to run. I could hear commotion coming from every direction, and if there were monster birds, it was only a matter of time before they saw the four of us poking up like bright, shiny worms out of the early-morning dirt.

“We have to find a place to hide,” I said.

Uri had a thought. “We can go into the sewers. I work for the city, and there’s a pretty big system right under our feet.”

“You want to hide from rats by going in the sewers?” I asked.

“Good point,” he said.

Michelle climbed the chain-link fence. It was only about eight feet high and didn’t have any barbed wire or anything. She made it up and over quickly.

“What’re you doing?” her husband asked.

“I’m making an executive decision,” she said through the links. She gestured to the building within the fence. “We’re hiding here. Now hand me Patrick.”

I didn’t like the idea. We might end up trapped, but it was a hell of a lot better than going underground. And the building was huge.

I heard a loud, high-pitched, glass-tinkling crash. Two cat monster shadows stood over the now-upturned Volkswagen, barely visible through the haze.

“Move it,” I said, jumping on the fence. Uri handed up his son, who no longer screamed but continued to sob. I remembered just how scary the normal world was when I was small. I couldn’t imagine how it must be now, especially with a hurt ankle.

All four of us landed in the gravel and rushed across the large parking lot toward the giant, square building. Tinted glass ringed the exterior of the modern structure. I couldn’t see a sign on the building, but I had a pretty good idea what we’d find within. Tucson had several buildings like this, and they were all the same on the inside: rows and rows of cubicles.

This was a call center. I’d never worked in one, but Nif had spent time in half the call centers in town. She never lasted more than two months. Her M.O. was to get the job, sit through the paid training, and quit a week or so after the real work started. Tucson had so many places like this, I used to joke her strategy would last her through her twenties. She’d get mad when I said that.

It’s not a strategy, she’d say. I just want a job that doesn’t make me want to vomit blood.

Several emergency exits dotted the walls, but there was no way in on this side except through a window. I didn’t waste time. I picked up a big-ass rock from the landscaping and hurled it like a shot-put. The big window broke on the first try. I kicked some glass free, and we stepped over the threshold into a cluttered office.

A computer monitor peeked up through all the paper. A white board contained a chart listing several names and all sorts of random numbers, and glamour shots of a very large woman wearing a rhinestone cowboy hat ringed the wall. A windowless door to the rest of the building was closed.

“This is the Telesync building,” Uri said, whispering. It seemed appropriate to whisper. Even little Patrick had quieted. I peered out through the hole in the window, but I didn’t see any cats coming our way. “They do directory 411 service. They also do 711 relay for the deaf. I knew a guy who worked here a couple years ago. This place is usually open 24 hours. They must’ve sent them all home.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think when Godzilla’s fucked-up little brother starts trashing…”

I didn’t see the hawk until its talons were about three inches from my eyeballs. Cut off in mid-sentence, I half ducked, half fell backwards as the shrieking bird flew into the office. It missed my eyes by millimeters, but the razor talons shredded my forehead.

And I thought being hit in the head with a baseball bat had hurt. Fuck.

The hawk didn’t have time to stop its forward momentum, and it careened into the far wall of the office, crashing into a Glamour Shot. The hawk collapsed in a hail of glass, dead.

Blood poured off my head. I held my hand to the wound, and hot blood seeped between my fingers. I hurt like hell, the side of my head still tender from my earlier beating at the hands of Scooter’s bat squad. I’m gonna die because a bird clawed my head.

“Come on,” Michelle said as she opened the windowless door. It led to a dark hallway.

I sucked up the pain and followed everybody, stomping the dead hawk as I passed.

A sound like an enormous flag whipping in the wind filled the office, and I turned in time as a ball of shrieking, knife-taloned birds torpedoed the window. The dark mass shone purple as hundreds of birds rearranged themselves to fit through the opening.

I slammed the door and backed away, cursing myself for not locking it. It was too late now. The animals worked for the Grinder, but had they gained any sort of intelligence? Normal birds wouldn’t know how to open a door handle. But I didn’t know if the Grinder had super-brained the things, and right now they were grouping and planning attack vectors and shit like that. I didn’t want to stick around to find out. The door shuddered as hundreds of birds slammed into it. The blood continued to flow, covering my eyes. I felt light-headed.

Despite the pain, I clasped my hand over my stinging forehead and followed the others down a long, straight hallway filled with offices. Half the office doors were open, and I didn’t think to close them until I’d already passed several. We pushed through a pair of double doors into a large employee break room. Uri put Patrick in a chair, so he and Michelle could move the refrigerator to block the doors.

I collapsed in the chair next to the little boy. I felt dizzy, like that one time Nif and I had gotten fucked up on Jack and did the bumper boats at Golf ‘N Stuff. A janitor’s cart stood nearby with a large garbage can, piles of cleaning supplies, and loads of rags. I slid a rag off the handle and wrapped it around my head. I pulled the knot tight. I could feel my pulse in my head. It stung hard.

“You need a Band-Aid,” Patrick said looking me up and down. It was the first time I heard the child speak.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I do.”

“It’ll stop soon,” he said. He clutched onto his plastic gun, and he banged it on the table. I remembered I had the real thing in my bag, and just an hour earlier it had accidently blown someone’s head off.

I watched Michelle and Uri struggle with the soda machine. “That’s not going to do anything,” I said as they tried to slide it next to the fridge for more of a blockade. “The doors open out. Besides,” I pointed at the second set of doors over my shoulder, “there’s more ways than one to get in here.”

They looked at each other and then me.

“We have to do something,” Uri said.

A loud crash came from the other side of the barricade.

“They’re in,” Michelle said. Uri scooped Patrick up, and they rushed out the second set of doors. I followed, stumbling as I ran.

We entered the main room. The call floor. I’d never seen one of these places first hand, and it was just as horrifying as I imagined. The Cubicle Jungle, Nif called it. The Soul Freezer. We ran down the dark center aisle, but there was nowhere to hide. We could crouch in a single cubicle, but the rats or cats or birds would surely sniff us out. With all the bruising and blood, I knew I smelled like a cut of filet mignon to the small mammals.

I tried to imagine what it’d be like, to be overwhelmed with biting rats and clawing birds. Earlier, I had watched the soldiers beset with bugs. I didn’t know which was worse. Bugs, small animals, or birds. I didn’t want to find out.

We turned a corner, and more cubicles spread out. Behind us, a massive boom followed by a loud, wet fizzing cracked through the silence.

“That was the soda machine,” I said as we ran.

We came to the far wall, with more doors leading off in different directions. Two of the doors were bathrooms. No way. A perfect place to get cornered. I guessed one set of doors led out to the main lobby, which was likely a room with lots of glass with a view outside. Coming in this building was a bad idea.

Uri started trying doors, but they were all locked.

I caught movement at the corner of my vision. A set of stairs climbed the wall to our left, and it led to a small, dark-windowed office that overlooked the call floor. I guessed that was where the general manager worked so he or she could survey the hordes of workers. The door at the top of the stairs was cracked open―and two people peered out at us. Women, both about my age. One waved at us as the other pulled her back into the room.

Before I had the chance to ponder the risks of accepting refuge from a pair of strangers, I’d already bound halfway up the stairs. I felt imminent exhaustion coming on, and I just didn’t have the energy to run any more. I didn’t tell the other two I’d decided to go up. I wasn’t even sure if they’d seen the two girls. Still, Uri and Michelle ran behind me, clomping up the hollow-sounding steps into the raised office.

I pushed into the room, and held the door for the other three to follow. I slammed it closed right after them. I locked the door this time, and turned, collapsing against it as I slid to the floor. Once my butt hit the ground, it pretty much told me it wasn’t getting back up anytime soon.

The two girls crouched in the back of the room, hugging each other in terror. One held onto a closed, black umbrella, like a weapon between themselves and me. I had to be a gruesome sight. I wore a black and blue body suit covered in oil and blood, half of my face probably looked like an eggplant on a bad day, and I had a grimy doo rag around my head, which still seeped blood. In fact, I bet two seconds after they caught our attention, they took one look at me and thought, oh fuck, what have we done?

“It’s okay,” I whispered. “This isn’t how I always look.”

One of the girls looked at the other, who gestured at me and repeated what I’d said. It took me a moment to realize one woman was deaf, and the other had translated with sign language. Uri had said this call center partially focused on 711 relay, which was for deaf people to communicate with people who didn’t have a TTY machine. I guess it made sense that they’d have a deaf person or two working here. I remembered now that Nif had once applied at either this place or one like this, but she couldn’t type the required 75 words a minute to get hired.

The deaf girl signed, and the other translated. “What are you doing here? This is private property.”

If I wasn’t so terrified of making any noise, I would’ve laughed.

Michelle answered. “Please. They’re chasing after us. We have to be quiet. They’re down there right now.” Uri had let go of Patrick, and the boy was now wrapped tight around his mother, his face buried in her chest.

Outside, I could feel the Grinder a mere quarter mile away. It had resumed its passage north, moving up First Avenue. If it didn’t veer off again, it would miss this building, but only barely. Once it was gone, I hoped the other monsters would go with it.

I surveyed the long, thin office, about ten feet wide and thirty feet long. The way we came in was the only door, at the end of the rectangle. The long side facing the calling floor featured dark, tinted glass, top to bottom. On the opposite wall, a lone window looked out onto the roof of the building. From my vantage, I could see a small, tended garden out there, cactus and winter flowers in pots, which meant the window could open and provide escape if it had to.

I placed bets it would have to.

Two desks faced each other in the middle of the room, probably the girls’ workspace. The deaf one, maybe a manager, and the other, her translator. Unlike the other office, this one was clean. Each desk held a computer monitor and keyboard. That was it. On the wall by the roof-access window were several old-movie posters. Breakfast at Tiffany’s was the only one I’d heard of. The Nun’s Story, Wait Until Dark, Funny Face were some of the others that seemed vaguely familiar.

The dark-haired, deaf one was pretty in a pinched-face, giraffe-y sort of way. She had to be six feet tall and was a tangle of arms and legs. Her translator had blonde, perfectly-straight hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. The only sign that she’d had a rough night were her round, saggy eyes. She looked like a sorority girl, the kind I imagined who would’ve owned the Volkswagen I’d just abandoned.

Below, a crash broke the silence. I knew it must be the cubicle walls falling over. I couldn’t see out the tinted picture window from where I sat, but Uri leaned against the glass, looking. He pointed to something, and his wife nodded. The boy stuffed his plastic gun into his pants and scrambled into his father’s lap. He clutched onto his father like a little monkey.

“Three monsters,” Michelle said. “Two cat ones and a lizard thing. I don’t see any birds. They’re still way in the back, kicking around cubicle walls.”

The two girls leaned out to look, and the deaf one gasped.

“What are those things,” Sorority Girl asked, signing as she talked. “We thought there was just one, giant monster.”

“Animals are breaking off the main monster and forming smaller ones now,” I said.

“Hey,” Uri said.

His next words chilled me.

“There’s a bunch of people down there. What… Are they dead?”

Sorority Girl talked, whispering and crying the words. “Several of us were hiding out in the building, and soldiers came in. They told us we had to go outside, and when one of us refused, they started shooting.”

“Those might not be real soldiers,” I said. Then again, after what I had seen and heard earlier, it grew difficult to tell the difference between the good guys and the bad.

We went around and introduced ourselves. Sorority Girl’s name was Betsy. The deaf girl was Zora.

Michelle asked for a first aid kit, but they didn’t have one. I smiled weakly when I realized she was asking for my sake. She and Betsy decided the best way to fix my head was to duct tape the wounds. While they clucked over me, Uri watched the monsters out the windows. The beasts skulked around the call floor, way over on the other side by the dead bodies. None seemed to yet take notice of the stairs. Perhaps the smell of the other dead workers masked our scent. If these monsters worked with the Grinder, hopefully they’d leave before they discovered us. The Grinder itself was closer than ever, passing right outside. The distant crunch of buildings being smashed reverberated the lone exterior window to the office.

We could do nothing but huddle and hide.

Chapter 21

All the adrenaline, all the emotion of the past several hours weighed heavily. It felt as if a pair of hands pressed on me, pushing me deeper and deeper into the floor.

Zora had been staring at me, and it freaked me out a little. I couldn’t communicate with her, so I just stared back. She signed something. Betsy translated as she and Michelle tried to clean me up. I was too tired and in too much pain to bother crying out when they touched sensitive places. Every part of my head hurt. Sitting down helped somewhat, but what I really needed was a hospital bed and an IV-full of the best painkillers they had on tap.

“I know you,” Zora signed as Betsy translated with a whisper. “You’re the manager at Big Shot Chicken. You’ve worked there for years. I didn’t recognize you with the purple face.”

I grunted. “That’s right.”

“I stop by before work at least once a week. You always seem distracted,” she signed. “You’re either playing with that Rubik’s Cube or staring off into space.”

Surprised, I said, “I don’t remember you.”

“I know,” she signed. “I tried hard for a while to get you to notice me. I thought you were cute. But the cashier girl finally told me not to bother, that you were in love.”

Suddenly, I was embarrassed and—what? Taken aback? I couldn’t bring myself to look at her anymore. It was a strange and awkward moment, so unexpected that it seemed even more surreal than everything else happening around us. It might seem weird, but, other than Nif and Samantha, I couldn’t remember a girl ever saying she was interested in me. Nif always had guys hitting on her, sometimes right in front of me. I’d gotten used to it.

(And Nif, to her credit, would respond with something like, “Can’t you see I’m with someone, you piece of shit? Even if I was single, I wouldn’t have anything to do with a rude motherfucker like you, so get out of my face before I smash it in.”)

So, a girl, interested in me? And I didn’t even notice? I don’t know why, but it blew my mind, and for a fraction of a moment, it helped ease the pain I now felt.

“Where is she now, this girl you love?” Zora asked.

And the pain all came back.

Even though Betsy interpreted my words, I figured out that Zora wanted me to look directly at her as I spoke, even though she watched the hand gestures at my left.

“She’s in the Grinder,” I said. I could feel the monster, just outside, like if I reached out the window and stood on my tip-toes and let myself fall, it’d be there, ready to catch me. I swallowed hard. Concentrate. You need to fight it.

Patrick looked up from his father’s lap. I thought he’d been asleep because he’d been so quiet.

“Her name is Nif,” the little boy said. “He’s given up on her, so we’ve given up on him.” The boy lifted his toy gun. Only it wasn’t a toy anymore. He pointed it under his father’s chin, what the fuck―

Ka-boom! Uri’s face jerked and exploded into a geyser of blood and gore. The picture window exploded as the bullet ricocheted and tore through. Patrick casually hopped off his dead father’s lap as the body slid out of the office window and landed below.

Michelle screamed. Betsy and Zora screamed. I jumped to my feet, putting my back against the door. I reached into the duffel and grabbed for my gun. I grasped plastic. The little bastard had switched the guns. He must’ve taken it while his mother cleaned my wounds.

Betsy backed away to the other side of the room with Zora, signing rapidly. Patrick leveled the gun at me. Beyond him, I now held a panoramic view of the calling floor. Two cats leapt through the cubicles toward us. Another creature, the size of a large saltwater crocodile with a hammer head slithered along the floor behind them, knocking over cubicle walls like dominoes with his massive head and tail.

“Patrick,” Michelle screamed at her son. “What did you do? You were getting better. What did you do? Uri! Uri!”

Blood and pieces of brain dripped from the ceiling.

Patrick leveled his gaze at me. “It would be so easy,” he said. “You know where she is. You can feel her. Despite turning your back, she still calls out to you. You don’t deserve her. We have given up on you, but if you beg, maybe we’ll let you in.”

Behind me, I could feel the thump, thump of heavy feet climbing the stairs. The door rocked as a monster crashed up against it.

“Tell your boss to suck my fat cock,” I said.

Patrick grinned with an expression way too mature for a four-year-old boy. “You can tell her yourself.” He lowered the gun so it was pointed at my knee.

Zora smashed Patrick in the back of the head with the umbrella, and the little boy tumbled away, falling out the same way his father had.

“Patrick!” Michelle cried. She rushed to the edge of the room. Behind me, the door rocked again. Zora and I stared at one another.

“The roof,” I said.

Zora nodded. “The roof,” she repeated out loud, speaking in that stilted way deaf people do. Betsy was already pulling the window open.

Michelle sobbed. Holy sh— I grabbed for Michelle’s shirt just as a double-tailed cat leapt through the broken window from the floor below. The creature’s top half split, and we were surrounded by fifteen hissing and clawing cats, rolling and smashing against the far wall. The intact bottom half resembled a two-legged, hairy meatball. It skidded to a stop, rolling up against the desks, upending them. Up close, I could see the individual animals more clearly, rats and more cats, twisted and bent to make the whole. The thing smelled of musk and blood.

As the meatball tried to stand, blind or disoriented, I didn’t know, the detached cats jumped at me and Michelle. Betsy was already out the window with Zora just behind. I kicked, and my foot connected with the closest cat. It flew, howling across the office, hitting hard into a poster for Roman Holiday.

Michelle was screaming. A black, longhaired cat had clutched onto her face like one of those things in Alien. Others crawled up her body, shredding as they went. I smacked one away with my duffel.

I reached again for Michelle—and missed. She fell backwards against the one part of the picture window that hadn’t yet broken. She looked as if she wore a multi-colored, twitching fur coat. She smashed through the already-cracked window, screaming as she fell to her husband and son below.

Sickness, pain, fear, it all welled up in me. But I had to keep going. I jumped over a chair and through the open window, landing hard on the roof, knocking over a terracotta pot filled with cactus. I turned to slam shut the window, but a creepy-ass, hairless cat launched itself through the gap, and onto my neck. It hissed and spit and tore at the duct-tape that held my skin into place.

I pulled the cat off, its claws raking my face and jaw as it chomped my hand. I screamed and threw the twisting and hissing ball of cat against the wall next to the window. Spitting and growling, it recovered and launched itself right back at me before I could even register the fucking, burning, oh-my-God-just-kill-me-now pain I was in.

Closed-fisted, I punched it in the head. Shit, it actually worked. The thing collapsed onto the overturned cactus, either dead or unconscious.

I still wasn’t in the clear. The window shattered, and howling animals flooded the rooftop. I turned in time to see the back of Betsy’s head leap off the distant edge of the roof, and I ran toward her and Zora.

A corrugated steel awning ringed the front of the building. I reached the edge just in time to see the women running across the misty parking lot toward a cluster of ten or so parked cars.

“Hey,” I called. “Wait for me!”

I crashed onto the awning, the duffel bag clutched to my chest. A glass jar and several syringes were in the bag, and if any of those broke, I’d be screwed.

I rolled off the awning into the bushes below, branches cracking and poking me as I fell. I worried about the dry suit. If I pierced the waterproof fabric, I’d have to start all over, and all of this would be for nothing. If cats eat me, all of this will be for nothing, too. I jumped from the bushes just as the door slammed to a Ford Explorer thirty feet away. The engine roared, tires squealed.

“Wait,” I called again.

They weren’t waiting.

I ran. The truck circled around, and for a moment, I thought they were coming back for me. Instead, the passenger window opened, and Zora tossed something at me. It landed on the asphalt, and I scooped it up as the truck screeched out of the lot.

A set of keys. Zora leaned out the window and pointed to three cars sitting together at the end of the lot before they disappeared into the fog. I rushed toward the cars. Which car was it? I fumbled with the keys—at least twenty of them. Who the hell uses this many keys?

Behind me, an explosion of glass. I hazarded a look over my shoulder to see the hammer-headed crocodile thing barreling down the parking lot. Just above it, cats and rats poured off the roof and onto the awning.

Fuck. I scrambled through the keys, and found a double-edged one, please be for a car… The animal beasts were nearly on me. I only had time to try the key of one vehicle.

The key had no markings, like a copy of the original. I had three choices of cars. Which one would a deaf girl named Zora drive? A deaf girl named Zora who found me attractive.

My choices were a battered Ford Focus, a red pickup truck, and a 90’s Cadillac Deville. Had I more than a mere second, I might’ve been able to puzzle it out. Instead, I chose the Cadillac because it was the oldest one and most likely to have a key like the one she’d given me.

I ran up to the car, jamming the key into the door.

I chose poorly.

“Shit.” I pulled the key out of the lock and turned toward the truck. That’s when I saw the license plate on the Focus.

ZORALUV

I jumped into the bed of the pickup—

CRACK! The lizard monster smashed into the side of it. The truck flipped sideways with a tremendous crunch as I jumped out the other side. I ducked as the truck crashed over me. It was the bed of the vehicle that saved me, and I crawled where the bed angled up by the cab. As I crawled, dragging the duffel bag with the strap across my chest, I remembered I had a giant knife lashed to my leg. I pulled it free as I emerged into the morning light.

I expected clawing, biting animals, but none of the small animals had come this far. I could see them, still by the entrance to the Telesync building. It appeared as if they were reforming back into two of the cat monsters, but only half of the animals had returned.

The lizard jumped on the upturned truck. It didn’t have eyes or a mouth, but its shark-like hammerhead swung at me like an ax, and I jumped back. This close, I still couldn’t tell what manner of small animals this beast was made of. I had expected lizards or something, but that wasn’t it. I swung the knife but missed. I angled away, so I’d have a chance to run for the Ford. I clutched the keys in my left hand.

The monster jumped, and I dived out of the way, slicing upward with the knife The knife cut through the side of the large beast much more easily than I expected. Bits of it flew away, detaching as they fell.

Earthworms. That’s what it was made of. They wriggled on the ground. I ran. Toward the Focus, key extended in my left hand. Nearby, the cats were almost fully re-formed.

I shoved the key in the lock, and yes! I yanked open the door, and jumped in. I cranked the engine just as the worm monster smashed the side of the car, turning it 180 degrees, nearly flipping it. I punched the engine, and I took off across the lot, angling toward the lone exit.

The cats gave chase, but the car moved faster. After a moment, I was clear.

Blood poured down the side of my head and from my jaw line. I didn’t even know I had this much blood in me.

I kept seeing the little boy blow the hole through his father’s face, over and over. How did I miss that he’d been a part of the Grinder? Michelle and Uri should’ve told me. Of course, they hadn’t. They were his parents, and they were protecting him. I wondered how it had happened, and most importantly, how they had gotten him back.

Parents do strange things to protect their children. Love. It’s the single strongest instinct a human has. It’s what my mom’s defense attorney had said during the closing statements of her trial.

I sped up, driving parallel with the Grinder, oozing down the street. I needed to get ahead of it, to implement my plan as soon as possible. At every turn, something new would pop up or attack me, like my face being torn to shreds by a psychotic cat. I couldn’t handle anymore. I had to get this finished. I had to save Nif.

Chapter 22

I hung a left onto Prince Road and jammed the accelerator. In order for my plan to work, I had to get in front of the Grinder. I drove as quickly as I dared in the fog, looking out for flocks of birds and roaming animal monsters. The road was clear, but random obstacles popped up, like shopping carts and the occasional abandoned or wrecked car.

A police car zoomed in the opposite direction, right toward me. I swerved out of the way at the last moment. The man driving the car didn’t flinch as he rushed past. I only got a quick glance, but I suspected he was no real cop.

I turned right, accelerating, running parallel with the monster, whose closest side was now a half mile away. The fog here was less dense, and I could see its outline as it lumbered north, still moving at about ten miles per hour.

Several animals stalked the sides of the beast, but I moved so quickly, should they attack, they couldn’t catch me. As I drove, I took in the sheer size the Grinder had grown to.

The whole thing was at least 150 meters wide and a quarter mile long, shaped like a massive millipede. It was too big to support itself on legs, so it moved forward like a parade float, the entire base responsible for holding the rest of it up. Parts of its main bulk towered a hundred meters into the sky. Tentacles waved even higher like snakes in the air.

“Jesus,” I whispered. Every time I saw it, it was bigger. How could I possibly find Nif in the midst of that?

My heart quickened the closer I came to it. I didn’t care. I had to try.

I overtook the Grinder until I was a good mile and a half ahead of it, then I angled the car toward the point where we would converge.

I hoped the birds and patrolling animals kept to the sides of the Grinder and didn’t patrol out front. Everything hinged on getting to the main mass without getting stopped.

I pulled the car over, grabbed the duffel bag, and ran into the small wash on the side of the road. It smelled of sewage, and despite the warmth of my multiple layers of clothing, I shivered.

Fifteen minutes, maybe less. That’s what I had. I took a deep breath and got to work.

As I pulled the hood over my head and neck seal, I thought of the days following Nif’s suicide attempt. I had asked her what I could do to fix it, to fix her.

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

I thought about that moment a lot. I’d never told her, or anybody, the story of how I’d become obsessed with the Rubik’s Cube. I wondered if she knew the story, if she’d have answered the same way. I regretted not telling her now.

One evening in the sixth grade, my dad gave me a Rubik’s Cube. He said, “If you can solve this before morning, we’ll buy you that bike you’ve been asking for.” I had stopped asking for a bike about a year earlier. We had moved from West Virginia to a town in Georgia, a half-hour south of Atlanta, and most of the kids my age didn’t have bikes, so I hadn’t thought much about getting one. But the lure of a new bike rekindled my interest, and I attacked that Rubik’s Cube.

I played with it for hours, twisting and turning, trying to figure it out. The harder I tried, the more frustrated I became.

I had it made several times except I was just one cube off. I kept getting so close. I’d think I’d have it with one or two more twists, but I would be wrong. I’d turn, and it’d be the same. Two colors would be swapped.

Somewhere around four AM, I realized what my father had done. I’d spent the previous two hours studying and recording the patterns, writing it down, and I had figured it out. He’d made the cube impossible to solve. He’d popped out a middle top square, flipped it, and put it back in, turning the puzzle into an impossible-to-solve trick.

I used my Swiss Army knife to pop out the offending piece, I reversed it, and I clicked it back into place. By then, I knew my father had given it to me just to be an asshole. He wasn’t going to buy me a bike. He’d thought it was funny, the idea of me desperately twisting that thing over and over all night.

I left the completed cube in the kitchen for my father to find. That morning he took one look at the puzzle, grabbed it off the table without a word. He walked out the door. As I watched him leave, I didn’t feel clever or have the sense of triumph I thought I would. I just felt sad.

Staying up all night took its toll, and I got in trouble at school that day after I passed out in the middle of my math test.

At home that night, I found a Huffy dirt bike sitting in the driveway. My father said nothing about it. The bike was used, had bald tires, but it was mine, and it ended up being one of my favorite possessions.

I spent that night and the next teaching myself how to ride. I got pretty good at it, too, and soon, other kids in the neighborhood decided they wanted bikes as well. I spent the summer after the sixth grade racing, exploring, and getting into all sorts of random trouble on the back of that thing.

Even though the bike was awesome, I found myself more obsessed with the Rubik’s Cube. I never again saw the one my dad had brought home. So I saved up my money and bought one myself.

I practiced every night. I learned different methods for solving it, including a few of my own. By the time I started the seventh grade, I had a new trick to impress the other kids at school.

The cube helped me. I felt calm, capable, solving it in just a minute or two. I always had one close to me. There was something comforting in having the ability to turn a jumbled cube into a perfect, six-colored square. No matter how I found it, I could put it back to the way it was supposed to be.

I discovered something that night after my dad gave me that first cube. There’s no such thing as an impossible puzzle. You can have missing pieces, you can be completely over your head, but there is always an answer. You may have to cheat to get there. You may have to sacrifice more than you’re willing to give, but there is always a way. I believed that with all of my heart.

I took out the jar containing the pink, brain-like neural junction Clementine had extracted from the corpse, and I poured it into the fanny pack. It slopped in like a glass of milk that had been sitting out for a couple days, and it smelled even worse. I had to hold back my gag reflex. I zipped it closed and tied the whole thing around my waist.

“This idea sucks,” I’d said, when Clementine suggested it.

“I know it does,” she said. “But it’s all I have.”

We’d talked about the zombie caterpillars that had so intrigued Royce and Randy, but Clementine thought the Grinder was more like an ant colony or a hive.

“From what I’ve seen,” she’d said, “it looks like the people that are physically attached to the main body have no autonomous control. Their brains are shut off, or put into sleep mode. It’s only when they’re detached do they work semi-independently, which means it might be possible to ‘trick’ the mindless workers into thinking that you are one of them. Though I wouldn’t try this with any of the Grinder’s minions who are moving around on their own.”

“But how can I do that?” I asked. “This thing isn’t stupid. It’s not a bug.”

“You’re right,” she said, “And it seems very aware of its surroundings. But it’s also gotten so big, with so many pieces, part of it has to work automatically. Just like you breathe, you pump blood, you grow, you fight infection, all without a single thought, this thing most certainly does not have full control over every aspect of its own condition. You’re small enough. It’s possible you could go unnoticed, like a mosquito on a horse’s hide.”

She told me of another bug, a butterfly called the Mountain Alcon Blue from eastern Europe. It didn’t want to be bothered raising its own pupae. Instead, it tricked entire colonies of ants into raising them for it. It did this by making their little butterfly babies smell like they were just another ant. Not only did the pupae get raised and fed and protected by the ants, but the babies also got first-class treatment because they mimicked the sound of the queen.

My plan was to make the ant colony think I was an ant, when I was really a butterfly.

The neural junction tied around my waist and leaking all over my crotch was the key. I’d smell like them, and if they probed, they’d hopefully find the junction, or sense it and leave me alone. I’d have every square inch of my body covered in a non-porous fabric that, in theory, would shield me from getting attached by touch, so the probing neurons of the beast wouldn’t be able to capture me into their network.

At best, they would ignore me, which would give me free reign to crawl into the Grinder and seek out Nif. Clementine was certain the larger the Grinder became, the more the interior would be like an ant colony with tunnels and throughways, all built and strengthened by bodies and the sinewy tendrils of the Grinder’s fast-growing nerves.

I wasn’t so sure.

To me, it seemed as if the people within were stacked like fish at the meat market, no space between one body to the next. If that was the case, then I’d have to crawl about the exterior and hope I’d find a way in.

And if I didn’t, I’d start digging.

Once I found Nif, I would implement the second part of the plan—getting her out.

I pulled the hood over my face and tightened the gas mask. I pulled the straps on the back to make a snug fit. Then I pulled the syringes from the duffel bag and duct taped around my arms and legs. I slung the entire bag over my shoulder. After a moment of second guessing, I decided to switch out my shoes. I took them off, pulled on the waterproof socks, and tied on the dive boots with the cleats. I pulled on the gloves.

The gas mask was surprisingly comfortable, despite the throbbing pain of my multiple head injuries. It wasn’t like the gas mask from the ’40 s with the twin eyeholes, but it featured a single, tinted screen that covered the entirety of my face, giving me a wide view. Duel respirator canisters hung at my neck.

I feared the tug at my chest would grow as I neared the Grinder. But it didn’t. I still felt it, ever present, but its intensity still hadn’t changed.

It was in those idle moments, I realized, that I felt it the most. When the adrenaline pumped especially hard, when I fixated on something else, it abated.

The devil catches you when you’re sleeping, my mother used to say.

I could hear it before I saw it. Like a constant roll of distant thunder, not quite so loud as you’d think given its size, but loud enough to shake rocks and gravel on the ground. It materialized from the fog like a tidal wave of death, a mountain emerging from behind the curtain.

“You’re an idiot, you know that, right?” I said out loud. I couldn’t hear my own voice.

Several large shapes marched in front of the beast. I slipped back down into the wash and peered through the weeds.

A pair of Hummers led the procession, smashing through cars as they passed. A soldier in full gear manned the mounted machine gun on the right. At first I thought no one stood behind the gun on the left, but then I saw the small head. It barely rose above the sight. Jeez, it was just a young girl, no older than six or seven, clutched onto the mounted weapon.

As jarring as it was to see her, I barely had time to register the sight before my eyes focused on the menagerie that ambled between the Grinder and the two Hummers.

Mini Grinders. At least 15 of them lumbered along, all of them bigger than the cats from earlier. They ranged in size from about eight feet tall to a couple huge ones almost as large as the Grinder when it invaded Arizona Stadium.

Only, they were different. Different even from the cats. It took me a moment to realize in what way. The real Grinder was made of people and animals, its exterior uneven and ever-changing. Even when it had been smaller, each incarnation looked like a hastily put-together Lego sculpture with arms hanging out the side, no true continuity, and a perpetual sense that it could change again at any moment.

These mini Grinders, however, formed very specific shapes. Unchanging shapes from the looks of it. Their exteriors were more like a quilt than a Lego sculpture. It didn’t look as if they were made to break apart and come together again, either. The bodies were fused with no space between them, formed to make horrific creatures whose only imaginable purpose was to instill fear before they destroyed.

Before I’d lost the radio, I’d heard the word ‘chimera’—the mythical creature made from parts of a lion, a goat, and a snake. I think that’s a close, but not perfect way to describe these new monsters who marched dumbly down the avenue toward my position. These were more like Frankenstein’s monster, or golems, made of flesh.

Two of them resembled massive scorpions with sharpened metal infused into the meat of their tails. Their bodies were a patchwork of naked human flesh. Towering behind was a 25-foot tall gorilla-like beast made of coyote. Two giant, octopus-like balls appeared, caked in nothing but charred flesh, giving them the appearance of a hardened shell.

But mostly I gaped at the middle of the parade, at the pink crab thing—made out of babies. It stood out more than any of the others. Its pink, bulbous body, made entirely of infants, skittered sideways as it moved along. The sight of it caused a fear and revulsion within me that I hadn’t expected, after all I’d seen. The infants’ heads all stuck outward, like the crab was covered with hairy pimples. And unlike the other flesh golems, these infants all appeared alive. And aware. Every single one of them screamed at the top of their lungs. The sound carried high in the air, louder and louder as the parade approached.

Like the Grinder, none of these monsters had eyes or discernible heads, and I wondered just how autonomous they were.

I had to avoid notice. If the golems or any other drones or animals in the Grinder’s posse spied me, surely they would rip me to shreds or just remove my mask and stick me face-first into the network.

I sunk deeper into the muck at the bottom of the wash, and I readied myself to jump up onto the Grinder as it approached. My heart beat so hard, it felt as if it kicked the inside of my chest.

I wondered, if there was a God, if there was a heaven, if this act would be considered suicide. How could it not?

Only twice in my life had I ever considered suicide, and both times were when I waited desperately in a hospital waiting room. After Nif’s overdose and after her suicide attempt, in those dark moments when I thought she wouldn’t make it. When I tried to envision a sunrise in a world without her, I knew it would be too unbearable.

The Hummers passed on the street to my right. Their loud, diesel engines roared. To my left, one of the flesh scorpions crashed by, and I cringed as I heard the sound of Zora’s car crushed under its weight. Glass rained on me. I kept low, praying they wouldn’t look down.

Crash! A leg made of screaming babies plunged into the wash, just inches from me. Water and mud splashed over me and the visor, and I instinctively rubbed it off. The leg was the diameter of a barrel, and the tip was made of metal that fused up into the flesh. I stared in horror at the babies who faced me, but their eyes were all clenched closed. With a sickening feeling I realized most, if not all, were dead, and their cries were really post-mortem puppetry designed to make any attackers piss in their pants.

The leg paused, as if it sensed someone was near. I held my breath.

All the eyes of the babies snapped open.

I didn’t move. I huddled in the shadow, doing my best to hide and keep from screaming. I knew young babies had limited eyesight, but I didn’t know how limited.

The eyes closed, and the monster continued on its way.

I’m coming, Nif. I’m doing my best.

The massive, round golems rolled over the road, and one passed directly over the ridge in which I hid. The asphalt at the edge cracked and crumbled, but it held.

That was the last in the line. I only had a few seconds to act. Am I being brave? Or stupid? I sprang up from the wash and scrambled up the side.

I turned to face the Grinder.

Chapter 23

I faced a wall of humanity and metal.

The forward wall of the monster was built like the front of a bulldozer. A curved plane rose and arched outward from the top. Cars. Trees. Rocks. Dirt. Animals. People. All came together to stack the wall 30-stories high.

I could wait for it bowl me over, or run at it. So I ran at it, the cleats of my boots biting at the cracked asphalt. I jumped, and I braced myself for impact, expecting to lose consciousness the moment I came into contact.

I slammed hard into the curved wall, close to the left edge of the front. To my utter astonishment, I still had full control of my body. I grasped and held onto a car door as I pulled myself up, gasping from the impact. I dug my feet in, and they found purchase in something fleshy. I didn’t dare look down.

I climbed. Nothing tried to stop me, at least not yet. At any moment I knew a hand would clench onto my leg or pull off my glove. I grasped onto anything I could, people, scraps of metal, the exposed ribs of a dog. I pulled myself higher and higher, hoping to find some sort of entrance.

A machine gun rattled in the distance. I ventured a look over my shoulder and saw it came from the Hummer with the little girl. She fired off toward something unseen.

I wouldn’t be able to climb over the top of the scoop, so I went sideways, hoping it’d be easier along the flanks of the creature. I crawled and clutched, digging my shoes into whatever would stick. I came face-to-face more than once with a person ensnared, and their open eyes stared at me, registering nothing. Already, my arms and legs screamed in pain at the effort.

My fanny pack kept sticking to the wall when it pressed against a person or anything organic. As I pulled away, it would come with me, but tiny hairs now protruded from the pocket of the bag, like roots searching for soil. I didn’t know if that meant Clementine’s plan was working or not, but I was still here, and I trudged on.

Everything started moving at once, and I could do nothing but hold on as tightly as I could. My left hand clutched onto the belt of an upside-down man, and my right arm wrapped around the limp neck of a dog.

What the— The whole thing reared up, spinning high up into the air like an upside-down tornado. Fuck me, it’s changing shape. I swung and twisted as I clutched onto the monster. If I let go, I would be flung off and splattered somewhere on the other side of Tucson.

I wasn’t sure how high we’d risen. The fog got thicker the higher we went, like I had neared the top of Jack’s beanstalk. I couldn’t see the ground anymore.

Splashes of blood and smoke erupted ten feet below, followed by the distinctive, terrifying dinosaur-roar of an A-10’s cannon. A moment later, the plane rocketed out of the fog. It turned on its side as it whipped past, so close I could almost touch it, the roar of its engine so loud I was deaf for a few precious seconds afterwards. I screamed as a wave of heat washed over me.

The Grinder changed shape again, and I felt myself screaming more as I fell. I still clutched onto the dog’s head, and, wham, my left hand found a metal bar. I jerked to a stop, then let go, falling several feet and landing hard on a woman. I grasped her arm.

Behind me, a distant explosion rippled through the air.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. Couldn’t they wait just ten minutes?

My gloved fingers started to slip, and I let go, sliding and bumping until I came to stop. I was now on the back of the monster. The smoke and fog made it impossible to see more than ten feet in front of me. It looked as if I’d fallen upon an arched plane that went on forever in every direction. The Grinder surface was black and crunchy. The charred flesh had turned to charcoal, and long lengths of metal crossed the back in a rib-like configuration, giving the impression of a string-wrapped ham that had been burned under a broiler.

My foot became stuck, and I tripped, catching myself on a metal girder. The metal’s consistency was unexpected, more elastic than metallic. This wasn’t metal at all, but something organic. I let go, afraid to touch the metal again.

I scrambled to my feet and moved as quickly as I could across the surface. The wind whipped at my dripping suit, and I could sense we moved swiftly.

Ahead of me was a wall of thick, white fog. As it billowed toward me, I realized it was no fog. It was smoke.

A strange sizzling and crackling sound, like water poured into hot oil filled the electric air. Before I could figure out what that was, hell rained down.

Out of the smoke, hundreds of bodies fell from above. They smashed into the back of the Grinder like hail, many bouncing off and away. They crashed all around me. A woman fell right in front of me, writhing and screaming. I watched in horror as the skin of her face burned away like flames eating paper.

All these people were part of a hydra tentacle, I realized, and it had been destroyed.

That smoke. White phosphorus. I choked at the thought. It’s some seriously nasty stuff.

“Ah, shit.” I turned from the billowing white cloud and ran as quickly as I dared.

Swoosh. One hundred feet above, a bright fireworks-like explosion punctuated through the haze, punching me in the chest with the concussion. From the explosion, dozens of flaming bright flares arced downward, crackling like an exposed electrical line, each trailing white smoke.

I had nowhere to go. If that smoke touched me, I was fucked.

I spun, looking for a way out. My mask might protect me from inhaling the deadly smoke, but I knew the particles would burn through the suit, exposing my flesh and killing me.

Movement caught my peripheral vision through the mask. A group of half-burned men and women crawled across the surface. Just in front of them, one of the metallic, organic girders dilated open like a jagged mouth, and one after another, they slipped in.

This is it. I grasped onto the strap of the duffel bag over my shoulder, I ran, and I jumped feet-first into the hole just as the last of the drones crept through. The opening snapped shut over my head.

I careened down like in a water slide, rolling to a stop on an uneven surface that breathed up and down, like I was on top of a giant lung. I jumped as a person crawled over me, skittering away like a spider. I smacked my head on something hard, what it was, I couldn’t see.

Complete, utter darkness encompassed me. I was inside.

I pulled the duffel around my front, unzipped it, and felt for the flashlight. I pulled it out and flipped it on.

If ever a vision of hell existed on this earth, this would be it.

The flashlight illuminated the low cave, an interior artery ringed by the metallic girders, which I suspected were nerve bundles. The hallway was tall enough that I could sit up, but I couldn’t stand. I stood on my knees, hunched over, and shined the light. The tube I’d come down was closed. I could only travel one of two ways, forward or backward.

Dripping intestines hung like vines. Blood and fecal matter and whatever other fluid existed in the human body fell in a mist, collecting on the screen of the gas mask. I couldn’t smell anything but the molded plastic of the mask, and I was glad for that.

All around the conduit, the views moved and changed as bodies, packed tight, cycled around me, some spinning as if on a spit. The passageway itself seemed more or less static, though it waved, like one of those playground rope bridges.

A quick succession of explosions rocked the entire monster. Even though I was mere meters into the interior of the beast, the explosions sounded far away. The Grinder reared up again, and the horizontal tube turned vertical in a matter of seconds. I grasped onto a thick nerve bundle to keep from plummeting. A rush of liquid sloshed over me, and I was thankful again for my dry suit. The monster crashed back down, and the passageway trembled like a plucked rubber band.

The connection in my chest, the invisible tether from me to the Grinder still pulled, even though I was already in the belly of the monster.

Why? I wondered. What did that mean?

Shit. It’s not the monster that’s reeling me in.

It’s Nif.

Chapter 24

Could it be her? My heart swelled at the thought, and got me moving.

The tether at my chest pulled me left, so that’s what I did. I crawled, the dying flashlight in my hand and the heavy duffel over my shoulder.

The passage became tighter as I traveled. I had to move to my stomach, careful not to rip the suit on a bone or tooth. My mask fogged in the hot, oppressive, air. I trudged on.

Several junctions and curves littered the way, but I always knew which way to turn. Sometimes the conduit would get wider, sometimes so tight I could barely squeeze through.

Occasionally I’d see movement up ahead or hear a furtive rustling noise just behind me. At a few larger junctions, I’d have to wait as a quick-moving line of drones blurred past. At first I flattened myself down as they neared, terrified they’d stop to investigate, but they didn’t seem to notice me at all.

Every time I got back to my knees, the fanny pack peeled away like Velcro off the meat floor.

I travelled for what seemed like an hour, and while I knew I was going slowly, it felt as if I’d crawled the length of the Grinder and back.

I turned a corner and headed down a steep angle. I knew I was getting close. I could feel it, and I quickened my pace. I emerged through a hole into a room about the size of my bedroom—small, but large enough to stand. I stood upon what seemed to be the roof of a car, and the walls here appeared metal, real metal, not the organic material the Grinder used to girder its shape, though that was present as well, but thicker, wider, and pinker than up above.

This room was a dead end, but I could feel her, just on the other side of the wall. I pounded, and the barricade felt solid. The material was dense steel, made from something studier than a car, like the wall of…

Like the walls of an armored truck.

My heart racing, I searched for a way in.

It seemed like this was the back of the truck, but if there was a door, it was covered with the thick nerve bundles or some other metal. I could find no handle or entrance. Come on…

There! Just to the right, a single, naked man stood sandwiched between two hunks of wall. If I could get past him, I might be able to angle my way around.

I grabbed the man’s wrist and pulled, but he wouldn’t budge.

In the trip through the Grinder’s pipes, I’d lost most of the needles I’d duct taped to myself, but I still had a few attached to my arm, and I grabbed one now.

“Sorry, dude,” I said, and I plunged the needle into the guy’s heart. I depressed the plunger, releasing the deadly neurotoxin into his body.

“Only use these if you have to,” Clementine had said. “It might not work, but if it does, it might work too well.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Well, it’s a bit of a cocktail,” she said. “I’ve been working on it for a while. It’s a synthetic neurotoxin. Two CCs of this stuff will drop an elephant, so make sure you don’t prick yourself. It’ll be game over.”

I didn’t want to ask her why she would be working on such a thing, so I left it at that.

The man fell forward. Dead and stiff. But it didn’t stop there. The entire room sagged. Two more people just beyond him dropped, like rotten fruit falling from the vine. One was a younger derby girl I recognized, still wearing her jersey from the Savage Patch Kids.

The organic nerve girders holding the metal into place twisted up, like the legs of a dead spider, and the car underneath my feet dropped away.

I jumped and grabbed the ceiling with my free hand, clinging to another nerve ending. Light filled the room, and I looked down through a hole in the Grinder, down to desert rock moving by underneath. The floor closed on itself just as quickly, people rushing from all directions to fill in the hole.

I may have gone this far unnoticed, but not anymore.

I eased myself down, afraid I’d be dropped through the hole or grabbed. I lifted my feet just as a new nerve bundle grew, moving serpentine across the floor.

But nothing attacked. Yet…

The man I had injected opened up a short passageway behind the metal wall, and I squeezed in, revealing the side of the vehicle I’d been trying to get to. It was an armored truck. A big one, too, with dual wheel sets on the back. The Brinks logo was discernible as I brushed past the passenger side of the truck.

She was in here. I could feel it.

I moved past the logo until I came to a single door with a window. This was the door the guards in the back used to exit and enter when the truck parked on a curb. I grabbed the handle and pulled, but it wouldn’t open. Even if I could get it open, I’d only be able to open the door a crack.

I peered inside, but I could only see dark shadows within.

“Nif!” I called, banging on the door. “Nif!” I could feel her, right there on the other side.

I tried the handle again, desperation rising. I couldn’t get in. I banged again, so hard my hand ached through the glove.

“Nif, please. Oh God, please. I’m here. I’ve come all this way. I’m here.”

I banged again.

Then I heard it. A rustling noise within, and a face appeared just on the other side of the glass.

Nif.

Pale, afraid. But it was Nif, and she was alive.

I found her. I found her.

“Adam?” Nif said, her eyes wide with surprise, her voice muffled through the bullet-proof glass. “Is that really you?”

“Nif!” I called as tears streamed down my face. “I’m going to get you out of here. We’re going home, baby. I’ve come to save you.”

A hand grabbed my shoulder. Another grabbed my mask. I was twisted violently around as my mask ripped off. A third hand grabbed my hood and pulled, taking hair and skin with it.

I never saw my attacker. All I felt was the cold hand that touched my bare neck.

Part 3

Chapter 25

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.

Chapter 26

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.

Chapter 27

The fabled tunnel of light stretched before me, dazzling and intoxicating. I almost retreated out of genuine surprise and panic, but at the same time, the sheer beauty of the light drew me in.

We slipped together into the light. Ted’s body became joy. That’s the only way to describe it. Every question, every fear he’d ever had melted away, became irrelevant. I was right there with him, feeling the same thing. His physical body broke into millions of particles as we entered the light.

We swept into the brightness, curving in a fast, upward motion as if on a waterslide in reverse. I could no longer see anything but the white, but I allowed the full sensation in. I ascended, higher and faster, swimming in the joy, the love, and promise of the everlasting.

Like a grain of sand landing on an infinite beach, we alighted. I got the sense this afterlife wasn’t much different than the Grinder itself. Only here, the pain and worries of real life were left behind as you became a part of the whole.

Nif’s turtle pond. It existed after all.

The Grinder was a bastardization of this place, a substitution of joy with pain, of contentment with a deep, clawing anger.

Just as Ted and I melted into the whole, becoming one with the ecstasy, it changed. Like a head-on collision with an unexpected brick wall, it changed.

The Grinder hitched a ride with us. I hadn’t felt her, but she was there, like a tumor emerging on his soul.

In a flash, the joy turned to horror. An incredible pain rose once again, growing and burning. It was as if my very guts were turned to fire and then sprayed outward through my pores. The Grinder manipulated Ted’s soul, turning it from love to hate, from joy to pain until it grew and expanded and exploded with the nuclear power of every atom bomb ever made.

I lost contact then, spinning like a dropped bottle cap into the ether of the network. Once I came to a stop, I was left metaphorically breathless and confused. I’d been thinking this a lot in the past few hours, but it seemed truly appropriate now:

What the fuck?

I searched until I found another soul about to perish, and I held on for the ride, holding back this time so I wouldn’t feel the excruciating pain. This was Wanda Gonzalez, a factory worker, mother of three, devout Catholic. She’d been shot hours ago, and she was about to die. I followed her as she took the same meteoric journey to the promised land.

We experienced the same result. The Grinder joined us. Wanda’s soul was welcomed for a moment, only to react and explode.

Despite holding back, I still felt the same searing pain, the same disorienting fall from heaven.

Terror.

That’s what I felt when I realized what I had just witnessed, twice. I wasn’t going to do that again if I could help it.

At the beginning of this, I told you I knew what the Grinder was, and why the Grinder had come. After hearing her confession, I still hadn’t fully understood the extent of what she wanted to do. She was angry with God, or a god, I didn’t believe in. Even after everything I had seen, I still hadn’t understood.

Until now.

She was using us against heaven. Much in the same way she was tossing corpses at the attacking soldiers, she was using us. She wanted us to be killed by the military.

All of us who became ensnared, we were touched in a way that made us so incompatible with the afterlife, our souls reacted to heaven the same way a cup of water reacts to superheated oil.

Each one of us who died was tearing heaven down, a little piece at a time.

How quickly an unbeliever turns, said my mother’s voice in my mind, startling me. The Grinder. I got the sense she was talking to me, not just talking at me like before, and I ventured a response.

“I don’t believe your lies,” I said out loud into the ether, despite not having a voice. Still, it echoed in my non-existent ears. “I don’t believe you were ever the son of God.”

I was trying to piss her off, but I didn’t get a reaction. She could read my mind, so she already knew what I did—and didn’t—believe.

You were chosen over all the others because you and I are very much alike. But we are not identical, and that difference is the key. You have something I never will.

I didn’t answer.

You have faith. Not in any bastardized, cannibalistic Christian god like so many of your peers. Your faith is in your beloved. Jennifer. Nif. Your blind devotion to her is a thing of curiosity and wonder. It is a true faith, and it is one I cannot replace. Still, it is so easy to manipulate, I can tell you I plan on exploiting this faith you have, and you will allow me to anyway. You worship her like she is the true deity, despite all that she has done. I have looked into you, Adam, and I know you. You would sacrifice anything on the promise of her safe passage.

“I won’t do anything you ask, and I won’t believe a promise you make.”

But you will. You will do anything if I ask it in her name.

“How could I?” I asked. “You’re…you’re killing us, using us because of some psychotic grudge. You’re trying to destroy heaven.”

The Grinder’s voice raged.

That is an untruth. Entrance. Not destruction. That is what I want.

Know this, Adam. Heaven is the truest, but most fragile, grinder of them all. A soul is presented at the so-called gates and tossed into the heavenly grinder. The lever is turned, and the soul is processed through the blades. But the grinder will only handle pure, untainted souls. Just the slightest hint of gristle, and the soul is rejected, tossed into the fire with the rest of the offal.

I am His child, Adam. HIS child. I came to this world, this life at His bidding. I didn’t ask for this. He was my Father. I loved Him. I died for this world. I died for Him. I was rejected, cast into the fire. My soul isn’t pure, because it’s only half human. But my other half is His. Being His son is what caused my damnation. That is all. I did nothing wrong but get born. Can’t you see the foolishness in that? Can’t you see why I would have so much anger?

Some so-called ‘god’ is He. He can change it. He can give the grinder a stouter blade, one strong enough to allow His child into His embrace. He promised me this eternity. He promised me. But I’ve been denied.

Well, Adam. If I am to be denied, then we are all to be denied.

I am touching your fellow man. I am touching their souls, adding a tinge of gristle. You are no longer pure. And now you are getting rejected by my Father, just like I was. He can stop this. All He must do is change the blade. Make the gristle grind. Otherwise, the destruction will continue. He must decide. Does He love you more than He hates me?

I felt sick, despite not having a physical stomach. “What happens to those who are destroyed? Like Ted? All the others who have died?”

I could taste the bitterness of her venom.

They die the true death, at the only hand that can wield such a knife. Yet, their destruction takes a heavy toll each time, and soon, despite my Father’s efforts, heaven’s grinder will stall, the blade will seize, and I will be free to enter.

“I can see why he wouldn’t want you hanging around,” I said. “You’re a bit of an asshole.”

I AM HIS CHILD, she roared, but the voice was no longer that of my mother. It was everybody’s voice, every intact vocal cord within the Grinder speaking at once, crying out both physically and mentally.

Once again I was left alone in the massive city of minds. A tremor reverberated through this pseudo-world, vibrating like the plucked string of an upright bass.

I have to get the hell out of here. I can’t help Nif like this.

How could I?

Before I did anything, I needed to find my body. While I still had free reign to travel the network, I became aware of a semi-circle no-fly zone in the middle of the Grinder’s mass, low to the ground. That was where Nif was, and that was where my body was as well.

I learned some about the internal structure of the Grinder. No matter what shape it took, its core remained unchanged. The semi-circle core held a diameter of about 40 feet, filled mostly with metal, the first people ensnared, and the Grinder’s brain, which I assumed was attached to Cece. Around the core lurked a secondary defensive ring, much larger and more flexible, but still not as fluid and moving as the rest of the Grinder’s mass, which made up the vast majority of its bulk. This secondary layer was protected from the heat and trauma by a thick outer layer of the fast-growing nervous membrane. Even with everything they’d thrown at it, the military had yet to dent this second layer. In fact, the first injury the Grinder’s inner sanctum had suffered was at my hands when I injected it with Clementine’s secret formula.

I entered minds and looked through eyes, but the interior of the Grinder was sheer black. I had no way to find my body, no way to get my thoughts back into my proper shell.

If ever I had a need for a Deus ex machina, it would be now. If this thing attacked heaven, why didn’t God or whoever stop it? It didn’t make sense to me.

So instead, I had to rely on the United States military.

Just as I finished my exchange with the Grinder, an Apache attack helicopter dropped missiles into the main body before skulking away. Unfortunately for the pilot, Captain Jamal Browne from Fort Hood, Texas, a flesh golem had a position behind the chopper and tossed a USPS mailbox straight into the main rotor.

The helicopter spun out of control. Captain Browne’s initial instinct was to kamikaze into the Grinder. As noble as that was, it was futile. The monster scrambled out of the way, and the Apache crashed hard into the parking lot of the Foothills Mall. A tentacle reached through the destruction and pulled Captain Browne free. His body was ripped in half in the extraction, and he died in a matter of moments, but not before the Grinder was able to garner valuable intelligence as to the current movements of the US military.

This was the first time the Grinder brought someone new into the fold while I was conscious of the effort. I learned everything just as the Grinder did. Most everyone already in the network was from Tucson or were early responders from the military, so they didn’t know much beyond what I already did of the outside world’s reactions to the appearance of the monster.

I learned a lot from Captain Browne. He wasn’t privy to the exact nature of the tumultuous and vehement conflict waging between the brass and the White House, but he did know this: nobody was happy. After an evening of unorganized and disastrous responses to the Grinder, the military was preparing a massive assault against the monster using every available and conventional asset that the Air Force, Army, and Marines were able to bring to bear against the creature. While hastily constructed, the attack was to be a guns blazing, bombs dropping, scorched earth, we’re-the-motherfucking-US-Military full-on assault that would pound the Grinder into the dust.

And it was coming. It was coming now.

Chapter 28

“You don’t like me much, do you?” My father asked me that night, the night before he died.

He had the blankets pulled up over him, and he was just a head and a pair of arms floating on the hospital bed, covered in wires and tubes. The sterile room was cold and oppressive, everything in black, white, and gray. A fitting end, I thought.

Nif had just stormed out. My father had spent some time telling me she was no good for me, with her standing right there, chewing her own lip off to stay quiet. I’d deflected everything he’d said. The man was dying, after all. I knew it. He knew it. Then he called her a whore, and she left.

“You never kept your promises,” I said.

“I got you that bike.”

It took me a moment to realize he was joking. I laughed.

“I’m sorry, Adam,” he said. “I wish I could do and say more. But it’s too late.”

“Don’t sweat it,” I said. “You got bigger things to worry about.”

“She scares me, Adam.”

I paused. “I love her,” I said, finally.

“You were going to be somebody. That day I woke up and found that puzzle sitting on the table, I knew. You were going to grow up to be the man I never was. But this wife of yours. I can see it. She’s going to drag you down.” He clenched his lips, then he said, “She’s just like me.”

“You’re full of shit,” I said, surprised. I felt angry, too. “Nif is as much like you as you’re like Oprah fucking Winfrey.”

He tried to sit up, but he laid back, exhausted. “No. Listen to me. One day you’ll see it, but by then, it’ll be too late.”

I didn’t see it. I still don’t see it, but he was so adamant, I listened.

“I met your mother,” he went on, “when I was vacationing with some friends in Makati, a year before you were born. I don’t think I ever told you this story.”

“You never told me any stories,” I said.

“She was singing at this club. She was so fucking beautiful, Adam. Her voice was like the waves hitting the beach on a clear night. You know what I mean? The most peaceful, calming thing you ever heard.”

I listened in shocked silence. My mom, a singer? I had no idea.

“I had to meet her. Me and my friends waited until the club closed, and I asked her out to dinner. Her English was surprisingly good. She said, ‘If you watch me sing three more nights in a row, I’ll let you take me out to dinner.’ Well, we were due to fly out in two days, and we were going back to Manila in the morning. But she was so enchanting, I just had to do it.”

“So, you stayed behind?” I asked.

“Yeah. They were so mad.” My dad laughed. “I hardly had any money left. I was twenty-two years old, and crazy. But I did it. I went to that club every night for the next three nights, just like she’d asked. At the end of the third night, she came to me afterwards and said, ‘You can now take me to dinner,’ and I told her I couldn’t. If I spent any more money, I wouldn’t be able to get back home. She laughed and took me to her place. She had this postage-stamp apartment. She cooked me dinner, and we talked all night. She told me about how she was going to record an album, maybe move to America to make it big.” He coughed for a long time. “We made you that night. The next day, I went home.”

“Wow,” I said, unable to think of anything else to say. “Wow.”

“Three months later, I got a letter from her. She said she was pregnant, and I was the father. I got so scared. I told your grandfather, and he told me to forget about her.”

I’d never met my grandfather. My dad never talked about him. He’d died when I was three years old.

“But I couldn’t forget about her. I started the process of bringing her to the States. You wouldn’t believe how difficult that was, even though—especially though—she was pregnant with you. But we managed it, just in time for you to be born. We got married, and for a while, everything was perfect.”

“What happened?” I asked, really asking, why did you turn into such an asshole?

“My father was right,” he said. “I’m no good, and he knew it. When he told me to forget about her and to forget about you, he wasn’t saying that to be a dick. He said it to protect you. To protect you from me.”

As he talked, my dad kept jamming the button to release the painkiller into his system, but he still had over twenty minutes left on the delay.

“Once your mother came, I was so happy, so excited to have her, I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid of losing her. She tried to sing for a while, but nothing came of it, and I felt so guilty for letting her down, like it was somehow my fault. She blamed herself at first, but eventually she started to blame me. And she was right. I couldn’t keep a job. I spent all of our money on alcohol. I never helped with you. As the years ticked by, she became withdrawn. She stopped singing. Then she stopped smiling. Sometimes, I’d look at her, and it’d seem like she wasn’t even breathing. She was just sitting there, looking off into space, and I’d think, I did that to her.”

He turned in his bed, so his eyes met mine. I’d never seen him this intense. “I had killed her long before she killed me.”

The doctors had suspected poisoning at this point, but none of that came out until after he died. I had no idea what he was talking about.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Why didn’t you go to college?” my father asked. “You had the scholarship. I saw the letters. You could’ve gone almost anywhere, on their dime.”

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“No, it’s not,” he said. “You didn’t go because this girl of yours didn’t want you to go.”

“That’s not true. She never asked me to stay.” I remembered the conversation I’d had with Nif at The Nomery just a few weeks before. You didn’t leave, and I fucked up your life anyway.

But she hadn’t fucked up my life. No matter how many times people said it, it didn’t make it true.

“That wife of yours, son. She’s no good,” my dad repeated.

In less than eight hours, he was dead. A few days after that, my mom was arrested.

The attack would commence at 11 AM, and was dubbed Operation High Noon.

(The Daylight Saving change had occurred the previous Sunday, and the overzealous dumbass who came up with the “High Noon” title didn’t realize that Arizona existed in its own special time zone. Technically, Arizona was in Mountain Standard time, but the state didn’t observe Daylight Saving. As a result, half the year the state was equal with Pacific Time, the other half with Mountain Standard. Luckily for the military, they operated on GMT, but to the late Captain Jamal Browne, who was originally from Yuma, Arizona, anything regarding Arizona and time zones was a touchy subject. He’d thought the name of the operation was a bad omen. I guess, for him, it was.)

After the operation, the results of the attack would be evaluated. Either way, whether the attack was chalked up as success or not, all military personnel had orders to have their asses more than 75 kilometers from the NEE (Non Earth Entity) by 21:30 GMT, or 2:30 PM local time.

Captain Browne didn’t know explicitly what that meant, but he had a pretty good idea. So did I. What pissed me off was that it appeared they were planning on doing it no matter what happened.

It was the worst possible thing that could happen. But it made sense, as much as I hated to admit it. They didn’t know what the Grinder was trying to do. Now that the Grinder had the ability to control people and animals from afar, the only way to be sure would be to nuke everything. Still, why wait so long? Captain Browne had wondered the same thing. He’d asked flat-out, If we’re going to nuke it, why not do it now, before it’s too late?

The response he received from the Colonel chilled him. The current administration has ordered us not to use nuclear arms on our own soil. The way the Colonel said ‘current’ suggested that in the next few hours, leadership might change. Captain Browne said nothing. He didn’t like how the president was handling the situation, but still… Best to keep his head down and see how it would play out. For all he knew, nuclear arms wouldn’t be used. Maybe they were planning on doing something else, perhaps a top secret weapon, and he was misreading what the Colonel was saying.

He never got to find out. He’d been sent to harass the Grinder and never made it back.

Captain Browne had been brought down at 10:40 AM, which meant Operation High Noon would begin at any moment.

The Grinder was strong, but strong enough to survive an organized, well-planned counter-assault? I doubted it.

That was what the Grinder wanted. To die and go to heaven. In order to do that, she had to first kill as many people as she could, and use their tainted, gristled souls to bring heaven’s blade to a grinding halt so she could get past it, and get in.

You are astute, the Grinder whispered in my mind.

“Go fuck yourself,” I said, shaken. It freaked me out every time she answered my own thoughts.

I travelled to the very top of the highest hydra tentacle to get a better view. I watched as a flesh golem peeled off the side, emerging like a newborn baby from the Grinder. Then another. I counted ten of them, all the same. Each elephant-sized creature ran on four legs. Square in shape with a massive, metallic claw attached to their backs, they were like organic catapults. They slipped off into various directions, running into the neighborhoods surrounding the Grinder. I tried to touch the minds of those within before one detached, but there was nothing there. These were all reanimated corpses, recycled to make mindless war machines. Other, smaller golems appeared of various shapes, all disappearing into different directions. Mini-grinders, the animals that had the ability to detach and reform, rushed off by the hundreds. Most of the monsters were the big cats, but other shapes peeled off as well.

I felt…light-headed. It was the only way to describe it, even though I didn’t have a physical head. I wasn’t sure why, but I suspected it was because the Grinder was losing so much mass, getting smaller as more and more pieces broke off and disappeared into the city.

The Grinder’s side opened like a massive, dripping maw. Thousands upon thousands of birds shot forth. They flew north, east, and west in three distinct groups, a never-ending stream of ink spread across the sky.

Even as these birds left, more arrived from all directions Most of these were seagulls, but I saw and felt lots of ducks, too. They’d land on the Grinder’s back and sit there for a few moments and then take off again.

I could feel each one as it absorbed into the fold.

The military had begun shooting the birds flocking toward Tucson. Animal memories were a strange thing to grasp as the sense of sight was so much less important to them than the other senses. One seagull had been flying for hours, coming from somewhere along the California coast. It’d flown over an interstate, which I guessed was I-8 to San Diego, and a huge, five-mile-long convoy rushed east toward Tucson. The soldiers filled the air with smoke and fire, and three-quarters of the bird’s companions fell before the seagulls figured out to veer from the road.

The seagull now swelled with a strange, pride-like feeling just after it landed. It and its companions took off again, heading west back toward I-8, this time to seek revenge.

Below, the Grinder had stopped moving and planted her center right at the intersection, her still-massive bulk spreading like a thick, oblong pancake well into the neighborhoods on each side. Three tentacles raised hundreds of feet into the air, waving back and forth as if to say, bring it.

Chapter 29

They brought it.

Before the previous evening, the only exposure I ever had to the United States military and any of their tactics was through playing Call of Duty, the rantings of Royce and Randy, and a couple air shows from years ago. I knew what A-10s were only because we had them flying over our heads every day. Things like cruise missiles, artillery shells, AC-130 support were only vague concepts to me, things I never knew of or cared much about.

I didn’t see where the bombs came from. They were either dropped from really high up, or they weren’t bombs at all, but missiles or artillery shot from far away. One moment, I scanned the sky, looking for any sign of the military, and there was nothing. You would never have known it had rained the night before, or that fog had encompassed the city a few hours earlier. It was a beautiful, warm November morning, and the blue sky was only partially obscured by the still-smoldering wreckage of Tucson behind me.

Then, Holocaust.

Fire became all I knew. Walls of it, burning so bright, so blistering, so thunderous, melting the outer shell of the Grinder into vibrating ash. This wasn’t a nuclear bomb, but it was pretty fucking close. The three tentacles disintegrated. I died a thousand times over, fleeing deeper and deeper into the monster until I was as close as I could get to the inner core. The fire stampeded over us, sending the entire network into chaos. I sought out the military minds, trying to figure out what the fuck had just happened, but all the minds were gone. I had nowhere to hide except in the ether itself, which had drained from a torrent, to a trickle.

I thought of the tadpoles, dying in the hot sun as their pond evaporated all around them. My consciousness floundered in the heat, gasping for breath.

At the last moment, I found a body, a man named Dante Medina. He was inside the second layer of protective nerve bundle. I fled inside his mind. He’d been sitting at the Sonoran hotdog stand outside the roller derby when he’d been picked up. His body was miraculously intact. Just scrapes, bruises, and burns from being used as interior padding. The man was an amateur body builder, addicted to steroids and porn. He worked nights as a male stripper and went by the name of Inferno.

In the blast, the Grinder had gone from tens of thousands of living minds to a few hundred. Cece’s mom. Jordan, the little girl with the peeled-back scalp. Patrick, the boy who had shot his father. Officer Beefycakes. Gone. Every remaining, living person I could find was cocooned in nerves, most of them roasting alive.

I didn’t join these lost souls in their doomed journey to the afterlife. I couldn’t bear the thought of their pain. I imagined the very girders of heaven melting and snapping under the pressure.

You idiots, I screamed in Dante’s mind. This is what she wants.

Nif, please be okay.

The Grinder condensed as much as she could, so grievously injured, she couldn’t move. More explosions ripped around us, but I no longer had any exterior eyes. I couldn’t see from where the attacks came, or what manner of craft caused them.

Your capacity for war is outstanding, the Grinder whispered, joy evident in her voice. Even greater than I imagined.

“You have to get the hell out of here,” I said. “I don’t know what they just did, but it fucked you up something hardcore.” Despite the protective coating of nerves, Dante’s skin blistered, and he’d soon be dead. A constant hammering had been added to the fire, like a flying tank pounding the side of the Grinder with explosive shells, reaching deeper and deeper with each blast.

Yet it is not enough, she said.

“Maybe you should give up then,” I said, frantic. “If this fucked-up plan isn’t going to work, then nothing will. Run away while you still can.”

The Grinder didn’t respond. I simmered in Dante’s body. The few that remained died around me, and soon, Dante was the only one left. I knew there were more in the inner core, but I couldn’t get to them, no matter how hard I tried.

Had Dante been conscious of his pain, he would’ve died an agonizing death, steamed alive, wrapped like a burrito in nerve bundle. I had nowhere else to go, so I stayed with him as he perished.

Once again I ascended, and the overwhelming joy encompassed me. He became conscious of his ascent long enough to experience the elation for just a moment before it turned, before he exploded like a nuclear bomb against the walls of heaven.

As we burst into an unimaginable conflagration, I became aware of a voice screaming. The Grinder. Its true voice. It was a male voice, heavy with age and anger and the ultimate pain. He roared in a language I didn’t know, yet I understood. His screams jarred my soul.

Let me in, he cried. I am your child. Please, Father. Let me in.

This time, as Dante was rejected from heaven, I felt others taken with him. The walls had been breached, and those that had died long ago, those who had made it to heaven, were ripped from their eternity and plunged with us into the thirsty black. In that brief moment, I knew those who fell with us. Dante’s grandmother, Millicent. Dante’s sister, Vanessa, who had died as an infant. Dante’s father, Raymond who had died just last year in a car accident.

Why? Dante’s grandmother wondered as her existence disintegrated.

The Grinder answered her. He betrayed His child. That is why you fall.

The wave of brimstone swept over me, and once again I was ejected from heaven and sent back down tumbling, whirling, head over heels, like a meteor to earth.

But this time I had nowhere to land.

…Except into my own body.

Every joint screamed as my nervous system rebooted. Gagging, I reached up and scooped a wet, slimy glob of I-don’t-even-want-to-know out of my mouth. I fell to my knees on the hard metal floor and proceeded to vomit stomach acid.

I’m back.

A second wave of nausea overwhelmed me as my body adjusted to the abrupt, dizzying disconnection from the dying network.

I grabbed my neck. It was sore where I had been attached to the Grinder. Tiny little pricklies jutted from my skin, like hard stubble. Searing, stifling heat filled the small space. My head ached. The dry suit hung about my body in tatters. My gloves were gone, but I still wore the Kevlar.

I blinked, but I could see nothing. Dark forms took shape. Was I in the armored truck? I blindly reached for my flashlight, but I no longer had it. My duffel bag. Gone. The fanny pack, the neural brain goo, gone. The needles Clementine had given me were gone as well. I still had the Rambo knife lashed to my leg, but I had nothing to cut, nothing to kill.

And it was gone. The tug inside my chest. The tug that kept me connected to her, to Nif. Gone. Along with my heart. A terrible, foreboding feeling overwhelmed me.

“Nif,” I called into the darkness. “Nif!”

No answer. My skin prickled with the unbearable heat. The oily smell was replaced with the acrid stench of burnt hair. Earlier, no external sounds had penetrated this deep inside of the Grinder. Now, I could hear everything. Jets roared above, as if, wherever I was, I had very little cover.

I felt around in the dark, but she wasn’t with me.

“Where is she, you fucking asshole?” I cried. I banged my fists into a wall, a pulsating, fleshy skin wall, colder than the surrounding metal. This was nerve bundle, I realized. It no longer attached to me as I touched it, but it coated the walls of my prison.

A weak, yellow light filled the compartment. A bloated, mottled hand lowered from the overhead cabin lamp.

Cece.

I was in the truck. We were alone, and I gaped at what she had become.

Cece was bone-white. Her overextended head and a pair of fat, naked arms floated in a glob of pink, vein-riddled nerve that spread around her like a massive, flowing dress made of flesh. Clumps of stringy hair remained on her lolling head, and her lower jaw hung in her skin, as if internally detached. Her flesh dress spread through into the cab of the large truck and along the interior walls where I now cowered, the tissue forming into tendrils as it connected to the rest of the beast through holes in the steel. With every explosion, the truck rocked, and her open eyes winced with pain.

“Cece?” I asked. I hesitated, then stepped forward to put my bare hand on her swollen cheek. Everything around us broiled, but her skin felt like ice. “Cece?”

Her eyes fluttered, and a low moan escaped her. Black drool dripped from her sagging mouth.

“Ahh-dam,” she groaned.

“Cece,” I said. “Where’s Nif? Where did she go?”

“It huuurts,” she said, her words slurred and difficult to understand.

I shook her head. Her skin felt fragile, waxy, like I could scrape it off with my fingernail. “Look at me,” I said, panic rising.

Her eyes slowly met mine. “Nif was here.”

“I know. I saw her. Please, Cece, where did she go?”

“Gone.” A crackling, fireworks-like sound shook the truck.

My heart lurched. “What do you mean ‘gone?’”

“…I could feel her, but now I can’t… Supposed to come back and reform, but... Now…now…” Her eyelids fluttered. She said something indistinguishable.

“Cece!”

Her body jerked, and her eyes snapped open. I let go of her face and backed away, surprised. I could tell that I was no longer speaking with Cece.

“Adam,” she said, much more clearly. “I’m glad you made it back. We are falling apart, and very little is left. If you don’t act quickly, all will be lost.”

“Where the fuck is she?” I asked.

“Calm yourself,” she said. The entire truck jolted with another explosion, and it was difficult to breathe. “She is hidden. But the mechanism in which she is protected has been injured. She is in danger.”

“No shit she’s in danger, asshole. Where is she?”

“First, you must do as I say, and then I will tell you where she is.”

If it wasn’t Cece she was talking through, I would have punched her in her face. “No,” I said. “I’m not doing anything for you.”

“Adam,” Grinder-Cece said. “Listen to me. I’m going to let you go. You’re to find your wife, and you’re to get as far away as you can. I’ll try to protect you until you are free.”

“What?” I asked. “What’re you talking about?”

“I told you. I have a special purpose for you. For your beloved. You are going to do it willingly and freely.” The Grinder lifted Cece’s arm and pointed it at me.

The monster continued. “I knew the moment I absorbed her that she would be the one. Out of every human, you two are the best suited. She is strong. But most of all, she has you—you so hopelessly, blindly devoted to her that you would do anything to keep her safe.” Grinder-Cece laughed. “It amuses me.”

The Grinder wasn’t making sense. Soon, the heat would become too much, and none of this would matter.

She continued. “Get to her. Keep her safe. Watch over her until you’re old and wrinkled, and she wakes up one morning to say, ‘Adam. After all this time, you’re still watching over me.’ And make no mistake. That day will come, but only if you try.”

“Why?” I asked, taking another step back. “What’s in it for you?”

Grinder-Cece paused, as if debating on whether or not to tell me the truth. The back of my foot brushed up against something soft. It was the duffel bag, covered with pink nerve. I reached down and picked it up. It peeled away easily. The spongy nerve broke apart as I pulled, and the edges of the nerves turned black. All around me, the nerves holding everything in place withered like a time-lapse video of flowers rotting in the sun. I pulled the bag over my shoulder.

“Everything I have touched, I have ground to nothing,” she said. Her voice creaked out, slower and weaker. “Everything but what’s caught in my teeth.”

“Damn it,” I said, sorry I had asked. “Stop spouting bullshit and… Fuck.” The entire truck turned sideways, and I slammed against the passenger side wall. The metal of the door handle burned my arm through the tattered suit, and I jumped in pain.

“If you want me to live, you gotta let me go right now,” I said, gasping the words. Cece’s body had fallen sideways, and she oozed down the wall, the pink flesh breaking apart as it fell. “Otherwise, we’re both going to fucking die.”

The side door to the truck, now sideways at my feet, swung open, revealing a hole in the ground below. The sewers.

“The atom-ripping blast your military plans will kill you and your beloved if you do not flee.” Grinder-Cece smiled. As she did, two of her front teeth fell out. “All that I made will die. All will help to break the blades of heaven. But, alas, this temporary defeat comes too soon. I have damaged my Father’s throne, but it still stands, refusing me entry.”

A stream of bullets ripped through the armored truck, shredding the steel walls between me and Cece. I clutched my hands to my ears at the incredible sound. Each half-dollar-sized hole punched a penetrating beam of light through. Whatever happened next would finish us off.

“Fuck,” I said. “Quit whining and tell me where she is.”

“The Botanical Gardens. Her body is entombed inside what you’ve been calling a flesh golem. The golem was tasked to return and re-absorb, but it has been injured. It is hiding where the butterflies lived, before they became a part of me. You must get there before they find and kill it.” Cece’s right side sloughed off the interior wall, melting like wax. “I have lost control of all that I have left. They move independently. Hurry to your wife. The golem will not give up its prize easily.” Grinder-Cece coughed. “Now leave me. Flee through this passage, which will find you in a safe place.”

I stepped toward the hole. I looked up at Cece one last time. She tried to raise her head to look at me, but she didn’t have the strength. This is how I’m always going to remember her.

“You can go fuck yourself,” I said.

I pulled the syringe from the bag, and I plunged it into Cece’s neck.

Sorry, Peaches.

Her body seized. Before I could scramble back, Grinder-Cece’s cold hand reached out and grabbed my neck. I felt a quick jolt, but it was nothing like before. I didn’t lose consciousness, and my head rushed.

In that moment, that fraction of a second I had contact with just the Grinder and nothing else, I learned. I learned more than any living person should know.

“Thank you,” Grinder-Cece said.

And then she died. Just like that. I had killed it. I had killed her.

I fell onto my back in terror. Her arm detached and came with me. I ripped it off my neck. I scrambled away, and I jumped into the hole.

I splashed into the muck, my heart thrashing.

“No, no, no, no,” I said, screaming the words. I clawed at my own face, unaware of what I was doing. My sanity slipped, held together with a paperclip, and I felt it bend and twist at the realization of what I’d just learned. Blood poured down my face, and a searing pain beat at me, simultaneously distant and molecular-level close.

Thank you, she had said. That fucking bitch.

“Goddamn you,” I yelled up at the hole.

Another explosion, and heat washed over me. I had to get out. I turned and ran down the cramped tunnel. I headed east. I had to get away before everything collapsed in on me.

I saw now as I ran in the dim light that the interior of the tunnel had been shorn up with rings of metal, just to keep it from collapsing. Nif and I had been in these tunnels tons of times. I had thought they were sewers, but they were actually rainwater drainage tunnels. They emptied into the Rillito Wash. Half the kids in town had spent time exploring this place. Graffiti covered every square inch of wall. Mattresses, shopping carts, and all sorts of junk filled the passageway. I knew exactly where I was, and I knew how to quickly get out.

This had been her plan all along.

As I splashed through the shoe-deep water, I finally knew what Nif had meant.

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?

It was true, truer than I ever imagined.

The only difference was Nif had sensed it long before I did. I had been falling, blissfully unaware the entire time. And now I was caught up in the blades.

I screamed again as I ran. Hate, anger, and fear broiled inside of me, consuming me.

What the hell was I going to do? First I had to get to Nif. No matter what happened. I promised myself, I’d hold her in my arms before this was done, before I even thought about the terrible decision I had to make.

Chapter 30

I emerged from the tunnel, wet and shivering despite the rising heat of the day. I had put a good half mile between me and the now-dead Grinder monster. I climbed up out of the wash into the road, and stooped low. Jets swooped overhead, firing missiles into the neighborhoods behind me. Black smoke bled into the sky, and the ground shook with every concussion. Every window of every building I could see had shattered. Walls had crumbled. Palm trees lay on their sides, roots exposed.

I had no idea what time it was. I guessed around 11:30 or so, maybe later. That gave me three hours to get Nif and get her as far away as possible.

The Tucson Botanical Gardens were a good twenty minutes away by car, and if I had to hoof it, I’d never make it in time. I’d lost count of the number of cars I’d been in over the past day, and I needed to get my hands on one more. This was more of an upper-middle-class neighborhood, so most of the people here were long gone. The few vehicles I did see didn’t look like they’d have the keys inside. I needed to get to the main road.

I didn’t have a gun, except the plastic one Patrick had left in my bag. I felt naked and exposed, but I couldn’t waste time worrying about it. I took a deep breath, stepped out onto the open street, and ran.

Nothing saw me. Nothing attacked. Nobody fired a gun. Overhead, jets continued to circle and pound the area near the Foothills Mall, but I was just far enough away to stay out of their radar.

The blue Hyundai SUV had a dead woman in it, but the truck looked to be in pretty good condition. It was the first vehicle I’d seen since I emerged that didn’t have shattered windows. I opened the door, and the woman fell out. I couldn’t tell what had killed her, but it didn’t look like she’d been there very long. I stepped over her body and got in the cab. Not only were the keys still in the ignition, but the truck was on, just idling. It had over a half a tank of gas. Hopefully that’d be enough.

I closed the door and punched it, squealing tires as I pealed out. I looked at the clock and saw it was past 12:30, much later than I had guessed. I had less than two hours.

With the Grinder-brain dead, all the drones and golems and chimeras ran amok. I had to be careful. The big ones would be easy to spot, but hundreds of smaller flesh golems roamed free, attacking anything that moved.

Even though she had lost control of them, the Grinder sent out one last order as she died under my needle.

Create as much mayhem as you can, until you are killed.

The Grinder couldn’t see the future, but she knew what would most likely become of every living thing she touched. When she touched me, I learned it too.

The animals and bugs, whose deaths didn’t affect heaven, would devolve to their original selves. The cats, rats, coyotes, dogs, and all the other animals that survived would mix back in with their kind. The physical alterations they underwent would seep into their collective DNA. (You’ll have to ask someone smarter than me to figure out what that means for our future.)

The drones…the C-1s and C-2s, they were all reacting in different ways. Some dropped dead the moment I stuck that needle into Cece. Most were now insane and lashing out at everyone and everything—including each other—until they were dead. Thousands of them stalked about Tucson in a blind, uncontrollable rage, breaking into homes and fighting in the streets. There was no help for these people. They were gone forever.

A few drones, however, would regain full control of their own faculties, and if they somehow managed to survive today, they’d be able to live semi-normal lives. Still, those lucky enough to cling onto their sanity were forever marked by the Grinder in two ways.

First, their bodies housed the now-dormant, alien nervous system, and any doctor examining them would see that and know them for who they were.

Secondly, their eventual deaths would mean the further destruction of heaven, and the eviction of their previously-dead loved ones from eternal bliss.

A pack of javelina ran across the street, squealing as they fled toward the foothills. They didn’t take notice of me as I passed. The animals were already reverting back.

I felt numb, thinking about what the Grinder had done. To me. To Cece. To everybody else. As I drove, tears streamed down my swollen and aching face.

I’d already decided not being part of heaven when I died wouldn’t be so bad. Most of my life, I never expected it to exist in the first place. I figured I’d die, and that’d be it. As it turns out, heaven does exist. But it’s some sort of inter-dimensional love hamburger full of happiness and joy, and time has no meaning. We’re processed through the grinder, and we all become one entity with no individual thoughts or will.

That’s what the monster had created here, as part of her defiance. Heaven on Earth. Only it was made from her anger and her pain.

But now, now that I’ve been touched by the Grinder, my soul is no longer pure. If I died now, I’d be just like everyone else who met the monster this day. I’d get caught in the blades, and I’d take out a chunk of heaven, dragging my dad and Royce and Randy down with me.

Nif, however… Nif was different.

The Grinder had made her unique. It had been the monster’s plan all along. I banged my fist against the steering wheel. What am I going to do?

To my right, a humanoid-shaped, twenty-five-foot tall golem smashed though a park, wielding a giant tree trunk like a club. It swung at nothing, as if it battled phantoms. I accelerated, hoping it wouldn’t see me.

The Grinder’s criss-cross path through the city left many roads impassable, and I had to beat the crap out of the truck to get to where I needed. Dead bodies littered the roadways. Several half-alive ex-drones shuffled like zombies, fighting in the streets. A few times someone fired a gun at me, but no bullets hit the truck.

I passed the roller derby arena where it all started. It’d only been seventeen hours. I couldn’t believe it. It seemed like days, like weeks. Bloody debris littered the road. My El Camino still sat in the parking lot, but the windows were smashed and someone had spray-painted a backwards swastika on it.

“Fuck you, Scooter,” I whispered as I continued on my way.

The explosions had stopped. I heard no more airplanes. The clock said almost one o’clock. The city held its breath.

I turned toward my destination, jumping over the sidewalk and accelerating through the small parking lot. The stucco and brick fence that ringed the small plant and butterfly garden lay broken about the street.

Nif was here, somewhere. I no longer had the mental connection, but I felt something else, and I knew it. She was here, and she was alive.

I jumped out of the car. I rushed through the broken wall. My footsteps echoed as my boots clomped across the cracked brick pathway.

Nif and I had been here a few times. I was never much of a plant person, but Nif loved the place. Even though the gardens were small, and planted smack in the middle of the city, the people who had created this place had managed to hobble together a real-life oasis in the desert. All sorts of random plants grew here, shit I’d never seen before. And half the year, a second part of the gardens housed a massive butterfly exhibit filled with brilliantly-colored butterflies from around the globe. Nif said she liked this place because it reminded her that the world could be beautiful, despite itself.

Somewhere nearby was an injured flesh golem. The Grinder showed me precious little about the monster. I didn’t know how to kill it. The entire beast had been designed to protect and move Nif. She was cocooned inside of its stomach, like a fetus, kept in a fugue to protect her from Operation High Noon. The car-sized monster was made from human flesh and the legs and claws of several different bears, some from the zoo, some that had migrated down from the mountains overnight. I wasn’t sure what this thing was supposed to look like, but I knew it would be scary as fuck.

Once injured, the golem had stopped listening to the Grinder’s commands. It was supposed to have hidden nearby in a concrete basement. Instead, it had been shot and just took off across town, despite the Grinder’s calls. It dragged itself to the gardens and collapsed.

I didn’t have a gun, and while I did have one more syringe in my bag, I couldn’t use it. Nif was attached to the thing, and if I poisoned it, I’d poison her.

I sighed and pulled the Rambo knife from the scabbard at my leg. Clementine had used this knife to kill a crazy C-2 who had jumped in her car. I had used it earlier to fight off a monster made of earthworms. Hopefully the rule of threes would work in my favor today.

A deep, rumbling growl emanated from around the corner.

Had I been less tired, less injured… Had I more time to think about a strategy, I probably wouldn’t have held the knife over my head, screamed with every bit of energy I had left—which wasn’t much, and charged around the bend.

The pink and brown monster quivered on the ground like a massive, deflating gelatin mold. Made of human skin etched together, the creature attempted to crawl away from me as I charged. Two hairy bear legs reared up. They waved blindly in the air.

I stopped at the sight of the waving claws, the stupid bravery fleeing as quickly as it had come.

As much as the Grinder had taught me, I still didn’t know how these things worked. It sensed me, but it didn’t have eyes or a mouth. I don’t even know how it had growled.

The flesh monster was injured on its left side, and blood oozed from the wound. It had eight legs—six to move around, two to slice things open. Two of the legs appeared dead, and they dragged along the ground as the monster pushed up against the brick wall.

It was almost as if it was afraid of me.

Go, go, go, go, go away.

The voice echoed in my head, suddenly and unexpectedly. It was the voice of a child, terrified and afraid. It was the golem.

I paused. “I don’t want to hurt you,” I said out loud. “You have someone.”

She is mine. I am protecting her. I am protecting her from those who want to hurt her.

“No,” I said. “You were keeping her safe until I arrived. Now you’re supposed to give her to me.”

I am afraid, it said after a few moments. I don’t know what to do. Mother told me to protect her. She promised me that after I did, she would take me home.

Its bear arms waved in the air. They would rip me to confetti if I tried to get any closer. Mother, the monster had said. It considered the Grinder its mother. The damned thing was intelligent. Newly born, alone, injured, but it was smart enough to think for itself. No wonder it was terrified. I almost felt sorry for it.

I thought of the old lady and of the cold pot pie, and of the advice I wished she had given me the day the tadpoles died.

“Sometimes,” I said, “parents make promises they don’t intend to keep.”

Then what am I supposed to do?

“What’s right,” I said. “It’s all you can do.”

The monster stood there, waving its arms for a moment. Then, it lowered them.

You are Adam. You are the one who will protect her.

“Yes,” I said. “I am Adam.”

The monster settled onto the ground, rolled onto its side so the injured gash faced the sky.

You must finish the cut to get her out.

I hesitated. Fuck. I rushed forward, put the tip of the knife into the long gash on the side of the monster, and I dragged the blade across its flesh. It split, revealing puffy white fat that burst open like one of those refrigerated biscuit containers Nif was always too afraid to open herself.

It hurts, Adam, the monster said in my mind. I think I am dying. She promised me I wouldn’t die. She promised I would live forever.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I put the knife down, afraid to cut any deeper. I stuck my hands in the wound, and I ripped. The whole monster shuddered. Blood, muscle, and fat poured from the wound, like the whole thing was a piñata.

If you see her, tell my mother I was brave. Tell her I was the bravest of them all.

A large sac vomited out of the now-dead monster. It was like a giant stomach, or womb. I took the knife and cut along the edge, opening it up. More fluid poured out. All that was left was a figure, curled like a fetus, but still wearing her clothes.

Nif.

I grabbed her, and I pulled her limp body to me.

“Nif,” I cried, shaking her. I put my ear to her chest, and she coughed. Black liquid spewed from her mouth. She coughed again, and her eyes opened.

“Daddy?” she said, looking up at me, her eyes glazed over.

“Nif,” I said, crying the words. “Nif, it’s me. It’s me.”

“Adam?” she said, eyes widening, finally becoming conscious. “What… Where are we? Your face…you got the crap kicked out you.”

I pulled her tight against my chest. Was this really happening? Was I really holding her? I never thought I’d touch her again.

She slowly put her arms around me, almost tentatively as if she didn’t believe it either. And once she had both arms around me, she squeezed so tight, I thought she’d burst my ribs.

“Holy shit,” Nif said. “Adam. I thought I was dreaming when I saw you earlier… You saved me.”

“I can’t live without you,” I said, whispering the words into her wet hair. “You’re all I have. You’re all I ever wanted.”

“Prolapsed Vagina,” she said.

“What?”

“That was the name of the band. I told you that you wouldn’t remember their name. I was wrong. We’ll never forget it, will we? Prolapsed Vagina. What a stupid fucking name.”

I laughed. I laughed so hard I started to cry.

“Holy shit,” she said, looking around. “We’re at the Botanical Gardens.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You were taken here for, uh, safekeeping, I guess.” I still didn’t know how much she knew.

She cocked her head to the side. “I had a dream, where this little kid asked me where my favorite place here in town was. I told him about the turtle pond, and he said he was too big to fit in a turtle pond. So I said this place.”

We sat there for a few more minutes, hugging. We weren’t out of danger yet. We had to get out of the city. We had precious little time to get away. But for those few short moments, I didn’t care.

Nif pulled away, looking at me. “She’s gone, isn’t she? The monster. I can’t feel her anymore.”

I paused. I didn’t know how much to tell her. My heart ached at what she didn’t know.

In the end, I decided to lie. For the first time in my life, I lied to Nif.

“Yes,” I said. “She’s gone.”

Chapter 31

“Whose car is this?” Nif asked as we rushed out and into the parking lot. “Where’s Doofus?”

“Doofus isn’t with us anymore,” I said. “You can thank your friend Scooter for that.”

“What?” she asked. “What’d he do?”

“I’ll tell you everything once we’re safe.”

It was just about 1:30. We had an hour. I headed east, figuring it’d be the safest. The Grinder hadn’t spent much time on this side of town, which meant the amount of monsters and ex-drones would be a minimum, plus it was in the opposite direction of the Grinder’s corpse.

As we drove, Nif stared out the window. She was soaked in the amniotic fluid from the monster’s womb. She quivered, and she kept her hand on my knee.

“Adam,” she said after a few minutes of silence. “I’m pregnant.”

I didn’t say anything, but I feared the sound of my heart beating out of my chest would be louder than the truck’s engine. I already knew she was pregnant. The Grinder had told me.

“I suspected for a while now, but I found out for sure yesterday, before the bout. I took a test.” She turned toward me. “Pretty crazy, huh?”

“Yeah,” I whispered. “Imagine that.”

“I talked to the boys,” she continued. Her hand clutched my knee, hurting. “While I was in…in there, in my dream. Our first babies came to me. They said they would forgive me. They said everything would be okay as long as we did it right this time. They said you would save me. And you did. You saved me.”

I had left the Rambo knife on the ground at the gardens.

My original plan was to kill Nif with the knife. I purposely left it behind.

The Grinder was right. I wasn’t going to hurt Nif. The Grinder knew I would never do it. The monster told me that she was going to use me, and she was correct. The right thing to do would be to kill Nif. As horrible as it was, the only sane choice was to kill her.

We stopped at our house at Nif’s insistence. We rushed inside. Our front door had been kicked in even though I’d left the back open. Scooter’s friends were long gone. Someone wrote the misspelled “Your Dead” on our wall with a Sharpie. Nif didn’t ask. She bent down, picked up the framed picture of Pee-wee Herman and clutched it to her chest. She grabbed a bag and filled it with her Punk Rock Smurfs and her stuffed alligator. She took a framed picture of Cece, and after rooting through her drawers for much too long, she found a picture of her dad and took that as well.

To my surprise, Hamlet was in the house, alive. I don’t know how or why, but the crazy little rodent had survived. Nif stuffed him in his travel case, and we headed out.

We drove along the side of the road, cutting through the heavy, abandoned freeway traffic as we angled our way to Douglas. Several roadblocks had been set up along the way, but they were all left unmanned. After the first one, the road opened up, and we took off. We were forced to take the long way, using Highway 80 through Tombstone and Bisbee. We passed several people walking on the side of the road, and most of them tried to flag us down. We didn’t stop.

Despite the warning that whatever was going to happen would happen at 2:30, nothing did until almost 4:00, just as we pulled into Royce and Randy’s parent’s driveway.

We parked alongside Clementine’s van, and as we stepped out of the car, the entire horizon to the northwest turned white. No noise. Just a flash.

“Don’t look at it,” I said. We crouched down behind the truck and held onto each other as we closed our eyes. Nif held my hand over her stomach as we huddled there and wondered about radiation and fallout.

“Cocksuckers,” Nif said. “I wonder what they’re going to tell people.”

“They’ll say they didn’t do it,” I said. “They’ll say the monster nuked itself.”

Nif and I held onto each other and cried. I shook, terrified of the days to come.

There’s that quote by Nietzsche that people on the internet love to fling around. It goes something like If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into you.

I think of that quote all the time. I see it used now sometimes when people reference the aftermath of the nuclear explosion over Tucson. As expected, the government claimed it wasn’t intentional. They claimed the Grinder had gotten hold of a nuke when it invaded Davis Monthan, and a drone dropped it from a stolen airplane as the infantry moved in. They also claimed the crash of Air Force One was the result of a drone flying a fighter jet.

People aren’t stupid. Some believe the bullshit, of course. There are always those who’ll believe the bullshit, no matter how high it’s piled. But nobody does anything. Nobody calls them out on it, not really. Not when they’re as scared as they are. When a major city in the United States suddenly becomes uninhabitable, when upwards of 300,000 people all die in one day—with more dying every day from radiation-related ailments, people sit down, shut up, and they do what they’re told.

When I see that Nietzsche quote now, I don’t think of the military. I think of what happened to me. The military did what they had to. The leadership went about it in a cowardly way, killing more people than the monster did, but in the end, they did what they thought was right, and they didn’t do it easily.

I am no better. Before all this, I feared I was a coward, and that I’d freeze up when it mattered the most. It turns out I did much worse than that. I’ve come to accept it. If it means I get to keep Nif with me, then I will happily live as a coward.

The abyss gazed into me, and it found nothing to change.

So I write this now as I wait for my babies to be born. I won’t tell you where we are, but it’s not in the United States. We move a lot now. You know how it is, how they’re hunting the few of us who survived that day.

Take Ruben Villanova, for example. They keep showing his face and the censored video of the standoff on the news. They shot him down like a dog, citing national security. Right in front of all those people at the border crossing into Tijuana, women and little kids, they shot him. He didn’t do anything wrong. His only crime was being attracted to a girl on a roller derby team. He was the Mexican kid, by the way. He was the one who had fallen off the Grinder right at the beginning.

I know the truth. It’s only fair you know it, too.

The only way now for Nif to enter heaven is if the gates are open when she arrives. Same for me. You know that much. But there’s more to it than that.

In that moment, as the Grinder died, she whispered her true plan in my ear.

Nif was pregnant. She was just over two months along. The babies, of course, are mine. They are twins. Two boys, just like last time.

From the very beginning, the Grinder sought someone just like Nif: an already-pregnant human with a partner who would protect her no matter what. I had to be told the plan. I had to know it, because I also had to know what would happen if I failed.

Even though the babies are mine, the Grinder has become part of one of them. I don’t know which one. She isn’t possessing the baby like a demon would. I don’t have to worry about one of them spontaneously twisting his head 360 degrees and vomiting pea soup all over the place. The Grinder is more like a hitchhiker, like I had been when I visited heaven those three separate times. She won’t control the baby. He won’t ever know she’s there.

The Grinder won’t get to heaven until my child dies, hopefully not until he’s an old man and has lived a full life. But to her, I imagine 80 or 90 years is a short wait, after so long.

But first, heaven still has to be opened. The grinder in the sky still has to be damaged enough that it breaks, so that the gristle-encrusted souls will be allowed in. Otherwise, when my child dies, the Grinder within will once again be rejected, and she’ll have to start all over.

That’s where Nif comes in. In addition to being the mother of the Grinder reborn on earth, she—like all mothers—is responsible for protecting our children. By carrying the Grinder within her, she has been marked and changed in a way no others were.

If Nif died now, she would ascend to heaven like the others. She would be fed through the process, and she would be rejected and cast out. But unlike the others, she would find herself in the lake of fire, ablaze and conscious of the burning. She would be subjected to an eternal damnation of endless pain, the same damnation that plagued her dreams.

Even after the babies are born, she will keep this mark about her.

In fact, this taint is so strong that anyone who comes into contact with Nif in any way is marked. It would be as if they had been a part of the Grinder themselves.

In other words, Nif is contagious.

A simple conversation. A handshake. You won’t know it. You won’t feel it. You can live another fifty years. The stain is there. A microscopic taint on your soul. Once you die, you are rejected, and those you love are taken down with you.

I can’t let Nif burn. I won’t let it happen.

If I hadn’t saved her, if I just let her die that day, it would’ve been over. We few survivors would further damage heaven, but that would be it. It would be done. The Grinder would be gone. I shouldn’t have let Nif live. But I did.

Nif and I spend our days delivering flowers to the elderly. I tell her it’s so we can earn a little money. The six grand from Big Shot Chicken is almost all gone. The old people love to touch her stomach.

I feel terrible, I do, denying them heaven. How could I not?

Nif doesn’t know the truth about herself. Thankfully, her mind has erased much of what happened that night. I don’t know what the truth would do to her. I don’t intend on finding out.

The Grinder didn’t know how many more tainted souls it would take to clog and break the gates of heaven. But she figured it’d be a lot. A whole lifetime of souls.

I have become the Grinder. I introduce Nif to new people, and they become gristle.

This is how the gristle grinds now. I make it so. I have to pave the way.

That’s the worst part, not knowing when I’ve succeeded. So I will keep going, raising my children, trying to make life for them as normal as I can. I promised Nif, and I promised them.

It’s a promise I intend on keeping. As we live our lives, I will make sure Nif infects as many people as she can.

But I am afraid. I’m afraid simply introducing her to people isn’t enough. So, I’ve taken it upon myself to help it along.

No, I’m not killing people. I’m not having Nif meet people and then following them home and knifing them down, though I have thought of that. I can’t bring myself to do such a thing.

So instead, I’ve decided to write.

I warned you in the very first paragraph this wasn’t going to be a one-way exchange. From me, you got the truth. In exchange, you learned about Nif. Like I said, this is Nif’s story. But it’s your story now, too.

I should’ve killed Nif, damned her to eternal pain. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

So strong is the mark upon her soul, just by reading this, just by learning the truth of what happened that night, and by learning about Nif, you are marked. Her impression is etched into you. Your soul has been tainted, whether you believe in souls or not. You picked up this book innocent, and you put it down as gristle.

I won’t say I’m sorry. I feel terrible. I feel a guilt like no one could ever know. But I’m not sorry. If I could trade places with Nif, I would. I was forced to choose between Nif and everybody else in this world. I was forced to choose between Nif and God.

My choice has been made.

If you’re young, maybe the final soul will break open heaven long before you get there. And then it’ll be okay. You’ll die, and you’ll be welcomed, no matter how tainted your soul may be. That’s how it should be anyway, don’t you think? As much of a monster the Grinder was, she was right about that. God was an asshole to her. God had rejected the Grinder simply because she was a little bit like Him. And it’s funny. She was mad at God for the very same reason. He was a little bit like her.

Believe me, I take no joy in this. Like the mythical Cyclops who gave up an eye to see the future, only to be tricked into seeing his own death, I live each moment in dread of the inevitable Grinder we all face. Like after that first scream I heard in the roller derby when Cece was attacked by the infant monster, I am filled with fear that I haven’t marked enough. That Nif will die too soon. The terror fills me. It consumes me. It won’t go away.

So please, my friend. Forgive me. And pass this story on. Hand off this book. Tell them it is the truth. Tell them it’s their story, as much as it is yours. Make copies. For all of our sakes. Pass it on.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have a confession. I never read the acknowledgements when I finish a book. I was about to type out some humbuggery about how it can ruin the magic of the end of blah, blah, blah, but the real answer is these things put me to sleep. As a result, I feel a bit like a hypocrite writing one myself. Still, I must do it. The fact is I couldn’t have written this without the help of several people, and they need to be thanked. In a way, it doesn’t feel like a simple page is enough. But it’s all I got, so here goes:

Thank you Meredyth and the crew. (Usually I would say, “You are my muse,” but I don’t think you’d appreciate it after reading this book.) Thanks to Necro Dave, Erik Wilson, and the editors. As always, thanks to Blair Underwood, and the music that paved the way. Most notably this time Green Carnation, Evergrey, Fates Warning, Pain of Salvation, and Dream Theater.

A special thanks to my beta readers: Ryan Ward, Kim Neville, Gio Clairval, Juanita McConnachie, Anna Maria Olsen, Rebecca Ogrodowski, and several others who I may have forgotten. I truly appreciate it. 

Also, to those of you who read The Shivered Sky and Trailer Park Fairy Tales and wrote to tell me you enjoyed it. It helps. It really does.

This book was written as I left Tucson. It was my way of saying goodbye. I’m not so sure I should actually thank the city, but I have to acknowledge it.

Farewell, Tucson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matt Dinniman lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife, his family, and his zoo of animals. When he isn’t writing, he works as an artist.