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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