Broken (7 page)

“
I know you who you are—”

“
You have no idea who I am,” I said, every word dripping with loathing, with frigid anger. “You don’t know me.”

“
Just go on home and we’ll forget this happened,” he said with an air of growing desperation. “I don’t want to have to kill you. Old Man Winter doesn’t want you dead.”

“
Well, we wouldn’t want to disappoint Old Man Winter,” I said, taking a step forward.

“
It ain’t a wise idea to piss the old guy off,” Clary agreed, watching me carefully.

“
I know what Old Man Winter wants,” I said, and took another step toward him. “I know what Winter wants better than you do.”

“
Well, he wants you not dead,” Clary said, hesitating, “and if you keep coming at me, I’m gonna have to put you down, hard. You ain’t got a prayer, girl. You can’t even hurt me. Don’t do it. Don’t make me—”

I pulled my gun before he could say another word and snapped off three rounds. Two of the three plinked off his face; the third hit his left eyeball and drew a scream of pain. I felt an inadvertent grin split my lips. “You might want to reconsider that bit about me not being able to hurt you—”

He roared and came at me in a lunge. I saw a flash of red dripping down his cheek as he did it, his left eye a bloody, destroyed mess. I dodged left as he tore past me, the sidewalk cracking with every thunderous step he took. I bounced off the boarded-up brick storefront behind me as he passed and started to turn, looking for me with the one eye he had left.

“
What’s that old saying, Clyde?” I sneered at him as he came around to face me. “An eye for an eye?” He glared at me and I stared back at him, unruffled; my sunglasses were still unmoved.

“
Oh, I’m gonna take more than an eye from you for that,” he breathed.

“
You already took more than that from me,” I said, “and I mean to take more than that from you in return.”

I raised the gun and fired again, but this time he was closer, close enough to raise a hand and block the shots with a ham-like palm. I tried to jerk my pistol away but his fingers closed on it entirely too quickly, and I heard the sound of the metal barrel creak as he bent it. I let it go and dodged to his left in a dead run, back toward the alleyway I had been standing in before.

“
Where do you think you’re going? ” he shouted and I heard him take off after me, feet crashing against the pavement as he ran. I kept ahead of him, running at full speed through the alley. I dodged over the tripwire I’d left in the middle of it, hoping he wouldn’t see it until it was too late—

The sound of a pallet of bricks falling onto Clary’s metal head greeted my ears as he snagged the tripwire, followed by a sharp shout of rage. I tossed a look back over my shoulder when I heard them drop and watched as he disappeared under an avalanche of falling red bricks. I paused only a second, long enough to see him come out the other side of the cloud of dust where he had broken through them. I turned on the jets again, feeling my thighs pump up and down as I ran out the end of the alley and crossed the street beyond.

“
DAMN YOU, GIRL!” The shout was like the end of the world, and was followed by the sound of a ton of metal leaping through the air behind me. Clary jumped twenty feet, surprising the hell out of me. I’d never seen him do anything like it before, and when he landed he did so not terribly far behind me. I jumped a chain-link fence in a single bound and heard him run through it behind me, the links snapping from the force of his charge. I landed in an overgrown field, my boots sinking into the mud from where the frost had melted but failed to be absorbed into the ground. The thick, sticky consistency of it caused me to waver for a moment before my feet broke free of the suction. I was moving again a second later, but it gave Clary a chance to close the gap between us to a little over five feet.

I was taking deep breaths by this point, the adrenaline pumping through my veins. I jumped the fence on the other side of the lot and landed on the sidewalk beyond. My eyes came up and fixed on my destination in the distance, not far now, only a couple of streets away—

I was still running when I felt something land on my coat collar. With a yank I felt myself ripped backward in a horse-collar tackle as my legs kept moving forward. The back of my neck was slammed into the street’s hard asphalt. Pain ran down my spine from the impact and instantly my head pounded with searing agony. It felt as though someone had taken a spear and stabbed it through the top of my head and let it run down the base of my neck, shattering my spine all the way down. I heard a cry of pain, a gasp for air and I realized it was me.

A steel hand gripped me around the throat and tore me from the ground, lifting me into the air. He brought me up to his face, looked at me with his remaining eye, a singularly humorless expression etched on his metal features. “What were you saying about an eye for an eye, girl?”

“
You owe me … a hell of a lot more than your eyes.” I ran a finger at him, straight on, with all my strength, pointed at the one good eye he had remaining. “But I’ll take ‘em anyway—” He caught my wrist with his other hand and I felt it snap, the sound of bones breaking in my forearm filling my ears along with a scream I hadn’t meant to let go.

He levered me up and held my face against his bloody socket. “You are gonna pay for this, girl.”

“
You’d make a girl pay?” I asked, trying to breathe around the crushing pain of his hand squeezing me tight. “Explains why you don’t date much.”

“
You always got a smart answer to everything, don’t you?” His metal head was nodding, slowly, his mouth a thin line of barely contained rage. “You think you’re smarter than me. Better than me.”

“
Yes and yes,” I said, squeezing in a breath. “But that’s a low bar to clear. Kind of like the one you were just in, only seedier.”

“
You think you’re better,” he said again, looking at me with a calm self-satisfaction. “Miss High and Mighty. You ain’t looking so high and mighty now, girl.” He gripped my arm tighter and I heard the bones shatter completely; a scream tore loose from my throat as it felt like they turned to powders from the strength of his grip. “I’ve always been better than you. Always.” He leaned in closer to me, and I could smell the whiskey fumes on his stinking breath. “I think it’s time you realized that, too.”

With that, he wound up, dragging my body behind him and then released me, throwing me overhand with all the effort of a pitcher sending a ball over the plate. I sailed through the air like a fastball, and when the strike out came it was me, crashing through the boarded up windows of a building across the street. I blacked out as I hit the concrete floor and came to rest, finally just as broken in body as I had felt in my mind.

9.

My eyes blinked back open a moment later, and every single nerve in my body screamed at me. I took a hard breath, felt the sharpest sort of agony in my back, and tried to sit up. There were bones broken, I knew it—in my arm, my sides, maybe even my skull. The smell of refuse, the sharp odor of rotting garbage, was all around me and something else, like urine, stunk in the abandoned building. My eyes swept the darkness which filled the world around me. There was a faint flickering in the distance, and it took me a moment to realize it was coming through a roughly Sienna-sized hole in the plywood over the windows, my entry point to the building, where Clary had thrown me through the boards. It was only wide enough to admit a little of the light shining from the streetlights outside, which was blotted out a moment later by a face and broad shoulders as Clary peered in. He was shadowed, and I couldn’t see anything but his outline, but I moved swiftly, rolling to the side as quietly as I could.

“
Girl?” Clary’s voice was unsure, as though there was some question about whether he had just thrown my limp body into the building. His hands came up and knocked away the remaining plywood, brightening the space around me by only a little. The lone streetlight outside wasn’t doing Clary any favors, I realized as he started to step inside. Coming from the lit street into the darkness of the abandoned storefront meant his night vision was completely shot for a few seconds as his eye adjusted, and that was to my advantage. I looked behind me at the back wall of the space; I wasn’t far away from where I wanted to be. Where I needed to be.

I brushed against a concrete block wall, now comfortably ensconced in the shadows of the empty storefront. I could see metal pillars that supported the roof, spaced every twenty feet or so. I wondered idly if I could ambush him somehow, maybe drop the roof on him or hit him with something from one of the refuse piles, but after a quick look around I dismissed both of those ideas. There was no sign of even a makeshift weapon anywhere in sight that would do any damage to Clary.

“
Where you at?” His voice came again, but he was lingering toward the front of the store. I stayed still, now lying flat against the wall. Clary’s remaining eye had to be nearly adjusted by now and motion would likely draw him to me. My eyes scanned past the pillars in the middle of the room. There were piles of rubbish every few feet, what looked like heaps of broken drywall and lumber, as though someone had demolished the interior of the space before vacating it but never bothered to clean it up. My eyes searched the walls; I had heard that scavengers had taken to stealing copper out of the fixtures of abandoned buildings but I couldn’t see any pipes or fittings from where I lay.

“
Come on out, now,” Clary said, taking a tentative step forward. I tried to conjure a scenario in my mind where I ambushed him, grabbing him by his metal head and slinging him around like I had once done to another man who wore a skin of steel. That possibility fled even more quickly than the first idea; with a shattered arm, I doubted I’d be able to lift him. One arm was simply not enough to manhandle a beast like Clyde Clary, at least not in his metal form. “I’m not gonna hurt you.” He seemed to realize the stupidity of this statement. “Well, I ain’t gonna hurt you much.” He paused. “More. Much more.”

I looked at the back wall again, scanning for an exit, anything. It appeared to be solid concrete block back there, but surely there had to be a back door, something I could use to get outside, back on course, heading toward—

My eyes found it as I heard Clary take another step. This time his voice was cross. “Come on, now. I’m getting mighty sick of this!”

I kept my breathing low and steady. I tried to sit up but the pain was too much. I kept myself from doing much more than taking a sharp breath, but I heard Clary freeze.

“
I hear you,” Clary said, and I could sense the malicious glee behind the slurred words. “I’m gonna find you. It’ll be easier if you just come out now.”

Little doll
, Wolfe’s voice came in my head,
run now
.

“
I’d like to,” I said, mumbling into my mouth without opening it, “but I don’t think I can.”

Go now, Little Doll
.

There was a surge of something through me at the same time as I saw Clary’s face turn toward me, his features still hidden in shadow. “Well … there you are.”

I flung myself to my feet and ran, the pain receding as I did so. Clary let out a howl of outrage. “Where the hell do you think you’re goin—”

I hit the exit door with my right shoulder, the one not attached to the shattered arm, and the frame splintered, throwing the door to the ground. The pain was gone, faded into the back of my head like a voice I could just barely hear. I turned right as I flew through the exit, sprinting on weary legs down another alleyway, this one asphalt. I reached the opening to the next street and heard Clary behind me coming out the door.

“
You ain’t gettin’ away, girl!” I was in the street and almost across by the time he reached the mouth of the alley I had just left behind. The night was quiet save for his shouting and dogs barking in the distance. “I’ll see you suffer for this!”

“
I doubt you’re gonna see much of anything with only one eye, Clyde.” I took staggering steps across the sidewalk and into what appeared to be an empty construction site as Clary followed behind me. He didn’t answer, but I heard him snort in rage behind me. I slowed my pace, taking careful steps on wooden planks that were lying atop canvas. Far above me, a gantry crane loomed, a giant corrugated metal cargo container in its grasp, dangling a hundred feet in the air directly over me.

“
You can barely walk, girl,” Clary said as I stopped and turned. He stood at the entry to the site, about thirty feet from me, the ground I had just trod the only thing separating us. I stared at him, my sunglasses gone, my face covered in blood, my entire body shaking from the brutal beating he had just given me. “You always thought you were too good,” he said, his metal face leering with his missing eye puckered shut. “Betcha don’t think that no more.”

“
You keep confusing bigger and stronger with better,” I said, my voice consumed with utter loathing. I snorted, letting my nostrils flare. “It isn’t. There’s a world of difference between being bigger than someone and being better than someone. And you? You’ve always been a waste of human flesh. A disgusting pig with no regard for anyone but himself, so ugly on the inside that the only thing that beats it is how ugly you are on the outside.” I sneered at him and saw his face darken. “I’ve always been better than you, because I’m smarter than you. And you’ve always been too stupid to realize it.”