Free The Grinding by Matt Dinniman Page A

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