The Grinding by Matt Dinniman Read Free Book Online Page A

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