The Grinding (21 page)

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.

“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
.