Metal Deep 2: Something Beautiful Read Free Page B

let everything else in this new life clutch my reigns. It was my life. Why couldn’t I drive it?
     
    Maeve didn’t know who she was dealing with. Hell, I didn’t know who I was dealing with. It was hard to accept that I was a different person. I still couldn’t use the “A-word,” but I knew things were different, and I was working on accepting them, whatever they might be. I kind of had to. If my own instincts weren’t evidence enough that something worse than I realized had happened to me, the way Maeve kept trying to catch sidelong stares in my direction proved that something was indeed wrong with me. I was cute. I wasn’t that cute.
     
    The less I struggled, the looser Spider-Bot’s grip became. How was I going to get out of this? I sat still and banged the back of my head against the wall in thought. Then as I stilled, I felt the grip loosen a little more. Then I remembered Dad’s “Fingers of Doom.”
     
    Ever work a Chinese finger puzzle with your fingers stuck on each side, and the only way to pull them out was to push in? Dad loved those things. We would go to the fair when I was younger and we’d always get a couple. He would have to buy extra because I would undoubtedly end up cheating. I would get a knife and cut it in half. I had the worse time with those things, something about a lack of patience. I had hoped the concept could get me out of those claws. I sucked in and tried to make myself as small and still as possible. The bot loosened more until there was a little space that grew between its flat metal body and mine. It wasn’t much, but it was all I needed. I pushed my arms outward as hard and as fast as I could. The bot strained for a second before two of the legs snapped outward because of the pressure. When it lost its grip, the mechanical nuisance fell off me, and I kicked it away. It was still skidding just as a young newlywed couple came around from the other side of the gas station obviously lost and circling the building in hunt of restrooms.
     
    The wife, in her little Bride’s-white, “Just Married,” track suit, took one look at me, dropped her bottled water, and screamed a sonic blast that could have turned glass into sand. The guy, who had a matching Groom’s-black track suit, fell backward and crab-crawled toward his wife. He knocked her over, before rolling over and running off to leave her there alone on her back screaming. Her husband dove into the car and locked the door. His wife was still terrorized at my feet. He’s what I like to call the “hero” type.
     
    I offered her a hand trying to help her up and calm her down. I was concerned for her, but she might as well have waved a sign saying “Here I am,” for the Street Vipers. I needed her quiet.  She wanted nothing to do with me, and finally scrambled away in a clay-ruined not-white-anymore tracksuit. At her car she tried to open the locked door, but her husband was too stunned to do anything. Only when she screamed his name in a way that turned his fear from me to her did he let her in. They screeched out of the parking lot. I don’t know if I felt more sorry for me at what I was about to deal with from the Street Vipers, or for that guy when his blushing new bride did the mental replay of how she ended up on the ground with ruined clothes.
     
    Almost immediately the chorus of bike engines came my way. I took off in the other direction and then ran back around the corner to the bathroom side as a biker came zooming past. I took a swing and knocked the guy backward while his still-throttling crotch-rocket drove itself driverless for another handful of yards in the empty dirt lot before teetering down onto its side.
     
    Another of his really smart friends came around and gunned his bike at me full blast, head on. It’s important to note, my back was against the building.  I jumped and rolled out of the way, and he ran full-on through the women’s bathroom door. The bike disappeared with a guttural crash.