Broken(22)

    “No,” I agreed. “It’s not.”

    He pushed against it again, as the water climbed another few centimeters to reach his chin. He spit as he tried to breathe, a spray of water shooting from his mouth and misting in the air. “Come on.” I watched him, unfeeling as he struggled against the tons of weight on his shoulders. “Ha ha ha. This is a good one, I gotta admit!” he shouted. “You got me! You got me good!” I didn’t answer, just kept staring at him, and the first sign of nerves appeared on his metal face. “Come on now, girl—”

    “My name is Sienna.”

    He looked at me in near-astonishment, the full gravity of what was happening starting to dawn on him. “Come on, now, Sienna! You can’t leave me like this!”

    “Leave?” I kept staring. “Why would I leave? I’ve got the best seat in the house.”

    He stared at me in dull disbelief as the water covered his mouth and he forced it above the roiling surface of the water. “Sienna! Sienna!” His face lowered into the water again for a few seconds, and then he pushed the container up enough to get his mouth above water one last time. “For the love of—!” With that, his mouth went under, and he struggled to keep his nose above the rising water.

    “I think the line you’re looking for is, ‘For the love of God, Montresor!’“ I watched as he took a deep breath, watched the water rise above his eyes, and he continued to struggle against the weight that trapped him. The container moved a little, here and there, as Clyde Clary fought against it. He jerked left and right, up and down, for almost two minutes as the hose continued to spit his death upon him until finally he stopped moving. There was a ripple under the surface and I watched his steel skin turn again to pink flesh as Clyde drowned. With the creaking of shifting metal, the container settled on him and blood bubbled up to the surface, turning the water as red as the rage that still fed my soul.





10.





    The world was a bending, twisting mass around me. I knew I was sleeping, and I had the presence of mind to realize I was dreaming. It was getting a little easier to discern these dreams. You would think, since one of my powers is to reach out to others in their dreams, that I’d know my own when I saw them. These were so strange, though, so unrelated to dreaming, that I didn’t.

    There was a heavy smell of cologne in the air, overpowering, enough that it made me want to cough, even in the insubstantial form I was in. There was a mirror in front of me, and I could see Zack in it, the whole world around me a purplish haze from neon lighting. It was a bar, the one I’d met Kurt in just a few days earlier. I shook my non-existent head to clear some of the fog, but failed; the world around me remained shrouded in a haze. I looked right and saw Zack sitting next to me, an amber beer filling the tall mug he had in front of him. He picked it up and took a sip, and I could smell it like I was drinking it myself, the sour scent hanging in my nose.

    “You don’t look happy.” Kurt’s voice was audible over the music but just barely. I looked out onto the dance floor, and there were actually a decent number of people dancing. A DJ was waving his hand in the air as he spun his records and a crowd of dancers filled the floor. I noted they were mostly women. They all seemed older, I realized. Past their twenties, for certain. There were a half dozen of them on the dance floor, all dolled up, clearly drunk. I turned back to where Zack and Kurt sat at the bar, and tried to listen to the big man speak to my dead boyfriend.

    “I’m fine,” Zack said, taking another sip and overpowering me with the aroma of beer as he finished the glass.

    “Your alcohol disagrees with you, lightweight.” Kurt gave him a cocked eyebrow then a shrug before he went back to his own glass. The stool Kurt was on looked like it was bending under his weight, but it might have been my imagination.

    “Okay,” Zack said, and halted as he waved to the barman for another round. “Okay, so … “ He paused, and I could see on his face a look that was the same as when he struggled to tell me something. I felt a pang; I always thought it was cute.

    Hannegan didn’t. “Spit it out already, will you?” The older man scowled. “Lemme guess … girlfriend problems?”

    “Yes,” Zack said as a new beer was set before him. “Kind of.”