Read Online The Grinding by Matt Dinniman - Free Book Online Page B

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