The AR-10 had an Aimpoint sight on it. The shot was easy. The angle was not. I fired once and the bullet slammed into the earthy mass right next to the bottle with a splash of black mud. The second round hit the Tannerite square.

The explosive wasn’t very big, but in the enclosed space it was brutal. There was a terrible blast that struck me as I fell. It was like getting smacked in the face with a bat.

There was no shrapnel, and the shockwave alone usually wasn’t too bad unless you were close enough for it to damage your internal organs. That was all good to know academically, but like I said, bat to the face. So I lay there for a moment, blinking stupidly. Milo’s rifle was at my side, the brilliant beam of the flashlight still shining into the shaft as gray smoke came rolling out. Black gobbets of meat and heavy white teeth fell through the smoke to collect on the elevator’s roof.

“Z! Z! Are you okay?” Milo had taken hold of the drag straps on my armor was attempting to lift me, which was tough since I was twice his size.

“Fine.” My head was swimming. I was going to be hating life later. One of my electronic earpieces had shorted out. I smacked it a few times, but it was toast.

Milo took up his rifle, went through the smoke, and shined it up the shaft. There was an awful squeal and the cables shook as the creature climbed back up. Milo fired several rounds after it but then it was out of sight. “Hate those things!” Dizzy, I struggled to my feet. Milo caught my arm. “Grinders are gross.”

“A what?”

He mistook my ignorance for deafness. “Grinder!” he shouted in my ear. “They burrow under houses, creep up through the floor, and suck folks out of their beds. That’s why I refuse to sleep in basements. The name comes from that rotary mouth-hole thingy. It’s like death by a thousand Dremel tools. Grinds bones right into pulp.”

I didn’t even want to know which poor bastard was unlucky enough to have that nasty thing sucked out of their memory. I shook my aching head. That was twice today that I’d been too close to an improvised explosive device.

“Secure these elevators in case something else comes out,” Milo ordered a couple of Hunters that had coming toward the sound of the explosion.

“I’ve got to get to Julie.”

“That might be hard.” Milo picked up a backpack. It was filled with more bottles. “Elevators don’t work. You can take the stairs, but you should see something first. Things have gotten weird. Even by our standards.”

Our situation was so FUBAR that random rotary death monsters in the elevators were unremarkable, but Milo thought something else was weirder than that? This couldn’t possibly be good. “Status?”