10 Fatal Strike

by Shannon McKenna

  “She has you, doesn’t she?” Aaro said. “She has you all over her.”

  Miles smiled, lifted his bottle in a silent toast, and drank. A mass of intricate sensory information started to crunch in his mind.

  Fuck this. He couldn’t just drink a damn beer, like a normal guy. The micro-analysis happened automatically. He felt every increment of the changes the sugar and alcohol made inside his body. Changing his perceptions, relaxing his muscles, lowering his defenses.

  His enjoyment of the beer drained instantly away, like a plug had been pulled. What the fuck was he doing, beer in hand, like a normal guy chilling after work? Who the fuck had given him permission to relax? He could not degrade his capacity to protect her.

  He stared at the sweating bottle in his hand. The McClouds were tougher than boot leather, all four of them, and so was Aaro, but they were no match for Greaves. That was definitively proven. It was a hard fact to swallow, but there it was, in his face.

  It was up to him. It was all on him. I’m keeping her. Was he, now? What manic shit-for-brains actually dared to say something like that? What had felt like steely confidence now rang in his ears like swaggering arrogance. Keep her, would he? Keep her where, in a pumpkin shell? He had fuck-all to fight Greaves with, other than a good mind shield, and a gun. The gun was useless against an opponent like that. His other assets were all defensive in nature.

  Unless he counted his brain. Which was currently flash-fried.

  Until he took out Greaves, he couldn’t keep her. Alive, maybe, but not living. What did she have to look forward to? Living on the run, eating crap strip-mall food, sleeping on lumpy, sagging beds in cheap hotels and rentals, tense and terrified, looking over her shoulder every second, jumping at every sound? No work, no art, no friends or family or children—or life. No ripening, no hope for the future, no peace. Just him, trotting along beside her like a hopeful hound dog, happy to be needed.

  Until she started to hate him for it.

  He’d find a way for her to be free. He had to. Just not free of him.

  He set the bottle down on the kitchen counter with a decisive thud, all impulse to drink it gone, and answered the question in Davy’s eyes. “Lack of vigilance will get you killed,” he said.

  Davy nodded sagely. “Whatever.”

  “I can help keep guard,” Miles said. “Where are you guys posted?”

  “Go guard her,” Davy said. “Do your mind-shield thing. That’s the best way to be vigilant right now, since none of us can do it.”

  That made sense, though he had to be suspicious of his reasoning, being how there was nothing on earth he wanted to do more than wrap himself around that girl’s naked body.

  Crazy. As completely fucked up as he had been, he’d suddenly found this vast geyser of sexual energy. He’d always had a lusty appetite for sex whenever he could get it, and granted, it had been a while since Cindy had gone on the fateful tour with the rock star and subsequently dumped him. He’d been celibate for over a year now.

  But the feelings assaulting him were so far removed for his mournful adolescent pining for Cindy, he needed a whole new unit of measure for it.

  Maybe it was the dreams. Her visits to his brain, all those weeks in the mountains. She’d imprinted on his brain somehow, and now he was helplessly programmed to nail her every chance he got. Out-of-control, like the rest of his life. It was like living in a fucking centrifuge.

  He didn’t knock, not wanting to wake her if she slept. She was such a slight bump underneath the fluffy white comforter. He tried to close the door without making a sound, but the door latch clicked, and she exploded into movement, sitting bolt upright.

  He froze. The cover flew back. Her hair was wildly tangled over her face, her eyes wide and staring. She was staring at him, but did not see him. Her heart raced. He could hear it, stuttering in a desperate skip-hop.

  Stress flashback, maybe, or a nightmare. He was afraid to move, for fear of scaring her. Something flickered in her eyes. She blinked.

  “You okay?” he ventured.

  She hid her face in her hands and shook her head, violently.

  He still hesitated to approach the bed. “Bad dream?”

  She shook her head again. “Tripping,” she whispered. “I took off the moment I started to drift off to sleep. Got sucked right down into the vortex.”

  “Vortex,” he repeated, letting his silence be the prompt.

  She nodded. “When I trip. That’s how it feels. Like I’m being sucked down into another dimension. Oh, God. Is this going to happen to me now, all the time, at random? Am I going to start seeing alternate realities while I’m in line at the grocery store? I might need to be locked back up in a cell after all.”

  “No!” His voice was savage, as if the force of his declaration could make it so. “No, that’s not going to be your life.”

  She just shook her head back and forth.

  He ached to sit down next to her, take her in his arms, but he’d had enough stress flashbacks to know that she probably wouldn’t be able to stand the contact. “You’re shaking,” he said. “What did you see?”

  She shuddered. “My two favorites, you might say. Or anti-favorites. I saw these visions almost every time they injected me. Now I’m seeing them even when they don’t. Disaster and doom.”

  Dread mounted in his belly, but he didn’t want her to be all alone with it. “What did you see?”

  “The first one is like a recurring nightmare,” she said slowly. “I see a park, but it’s overgrown, and the people in it look listless, vacant. Sometimes a man is collapsed on the sidewalk, and two people are sitting on the park bench next to him, staring into nowhere. They don’t even seem to see him. People are lying on the grass, and it’s not clear if they’re dead or alive. Garbage is blowing everywhere. Then I see a woman, staring out the window, and behind her a baby in a crib is screaming, but she doesn’t hear him. I have no idea what it all means.”

  He shivered, too. “Creepy,” he commented.

  “Oh, yeah. And I saw the bomb one, too, like always. The Tokyo train station. A terrorist attack. Four hundred and seventy-eight people dead. Every time I saw that, I begged Hu and Anabel to do something about it, but they ignored me.”

  “That’s awful,” he said quietly.

  She looked up at him, lip caught tight and bloodless between her teeth. “Did it happen? The bomb?”

  “I haven’t heard about it,” he said. “I’ve been in the mountains, but I think someone would have mentioned a disaster as big as that. Let me do a search.” He crouched down, pulled the laptop and router out of the bag that one of his friends had pulled from his vehicle and left outside the bedroom door. He ran a check for bombs, terrorists, Tokyo.

  Nothing relevant or current jumped out. He shook his head.

  The look of dawning excitement on her face scared him, in some obscure way. “What’s today’s date, Miles?” Her voice was shaking.

  He glanced at the computer and told her.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “It hasn’t happened yet. I remember, in one of the trips, I saw the digital clock. It happened on the seventh. At afternoon rush hour.”

  “That’s tomorrow,” he said. The clenching sense of dread grew.

  “But it’s a day later there! It’s morning, nine hours later, but tomorrow! Miles, if it hasn’t happened yet, then I can stop it! I can call someone about the bomb before it goes off!”

  “Yeah, but call who? Tell them what?”

  Her eyes were feverishly bright. “The police! It’s a big green rucksack, packed full of explosives, left in the luggage compartment of a commuter train that’s coming into Tokyo Station at five in the afternoon. But there’s still time. Oh, God, Miles.”

  She grabbed the burner phone that Aaro had bought for her, and stared at it, helplessly, like she was trying to remember how it worked.

  He couldn’t say no, but he felt the doom, like a distant drumbeat.

  “Who are you going to call?”
he said. “The police? Do you speak Japanese?”

  Her excitement shifted to anxiety. “No. I speak some European languages, but no Asian ones. Do you?”

  He shook his head.

  “There will be someone there who speaks English,” she said.

  “They’ll want you to explain your source,” he said. “It’s going to be a hard sell. Even without the language barrier.”

  “I have to tell someone!”

  He lifted his hands. “Just as you say,” he said quietly. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t. I’m just saying it’s not going to be easy, and you’re not in a good position to make them believe you.”

  She hunched over, pressing her fists to her mouth, thinking furiously with her eyes squeezed shut. “Wait. I know a guy,” she said. “We were in high school together, in New York. He’s an art director for an online magazine in Seattle, but he grew up in Kyoto. He can call for me. He’ll help me sell it to them.”

  “You know his phone number?” he asked. “You’re going to call him, right now? It’s midnight.”

  “Yes.” She started to punch in a number.

  He watched, with dread building in his body. Any way he looked at it, this call was a bad idea security wise, for so many compelling reasons, he didn’t even want to start listing them. But it was an untraceable burner phone, and they were sure to be gone from here tomorrow. Sooner rather than later, if he had his way.

  He could not discourage her from making this call. It was an immediate way for her to turn some of the badness into good. To make some sense of the madness, the pain she’d been through. To strike a blow for righteousness, the light. He couldn’t take that away from her.

  And yet, for some reason, it was scaring the shit out of him.

  “Hey, Keiko? . . . it’s Lara . . . yes, I know. I know . . . yeah, not yet, but I will. I can’t tell you now. I was in trouble, but I’m okay. But I have to tell . . . no, really, Keiko. Listen to me. I have to ask you to do something for me. You need to call the police in Tokyo. There’s going to be a bomb in the main train station. It’s coming in on a commuter train that arrives at five P.M. That’s when it will go off today, if someone doesn’t stop it. Could you call the . . . no, I’m sorry, I can’t, but . . . it doesn’t matter how I know. All that matters is that I do know! . . . I’m talking hundreds of people, Keiko! . . . yes! Tell them it’s an anonymous tip . . . do I seem like a person who plays practical jokes? . . . Just do this for me, and I swear, I’ll . . . thank you. Yes, I’ll take all the blame if it . . . yes. Yes. Thank you . . . and I—”

  “Lara,” Miles broke in.

  “Just a sec, Keiko,” she murmured, looking up. “What?”

  “Tell him to leave town, after he makes the call,” Miles said. “Tell him to lay low. Just in case.”

  Lara stared at him, eyes huge with dawning realization. “Oh. God. You mean, you think he’ll be in danger?“

  “Just tell him, Lara.”

  “Ah, Keiko. My friend here was just suggesting that you leave town for a while, after you call,” she faltered. “I’m really sorry, but it might be dangerous for you. I don’t mean to mess up your life, but—”

  There was a burst of voluble talking on the other end of the line. Lara just listened, her hand over her mouth. “Yes, I know,” she whispered. “Sorry. Yes. Thanks. I will, I promise. As soon as I can.”

  She let the phone drop. “He’ll make the call. He thinks I’m nuts, but he’ll do it, just in case I’m not. Good old Keiko.”

  Yeah. Keiko, whose cell phone number she still knew by heart, even after six months in solitary confinement. “Good old Keiko,” he echoed. “So. Was he your boyfriend?”

  That startled a smile onto her face. “I’m talking about terrorist bombs, and you want to know about my ex-boyfriends?”

  Miles shrugged. “Call me shallow.”

  She convulsed. For an awful moment, he thought she was sobbing. Then he realized it was silent laughter. “Right,” she choked out. “You, shallow. If you must know, yes. He was my boyfriend. For a little while.” She dropped her hands, eyes demurely fixed on the comforter in front of her. “It fizzled out. But we stayed friends.”

  “Fizzled?” He stared at her, his mind blank. It just was not a word he could associate in any way with the naked woman curled up on that bed. Her gorgeous eyes, her perfect tits, her swirling cape of hair, her slender legs. She was perfect. Everything about her pulled him like a tractor beam. Her smell scrambled his brain at twenty paces.

  “Fizzled how?” he demanded.

  She waved, vaguely. “It happens,” she said. “If I knew how it happened, maybe it wouldn’t happen to me so fast.”

  “I don’t get how any man wouldn’t kill to be with you.”

  With that gut-clenching hindsight that so often afflicted him, the words stuck him as stalker creepy. But he couldn’t take them back.

  He clamped down on the urge to backpedal, and just waited, teeth clenched, for the fallout.

  Her eyes skittered shyly away. “I, um . . . don’t usually inspire such violent throes of emotion in men.”

  “Get used to it,” he said.

  This time she did meet his eyes. The silence between them was charged, buzzing with meaning. He was attuned to her every breath. Her scent fogged his brain. Yanked him toward her.

  He walked to the bed, and stood, staring down at her. She cleared her throat, eyes darting down over his body.

  “Keiko is gay,” she said. “He came out senior year. He’s with this new guy now. Franz. A dancer. A Norse god type. Full of muscles.”

  Miles let out a slow breath. “Ah. I see.”

  “Just, you know. To give you a little context. For the fizzling.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate that. It was tying my brain in knots,” he told her. She clearly was trying not to smile, so he ventured to continue. “Great. I wish them all the best. Go, Keiko and Franz. Tear it up, boys.”

  She snorted into her hands again. “I can’t believe I’m laughing right now,” she whispered.

  “I love it,” he said. “I love it when you laugh.”

  She gave him a look that made a lump swell into his throat. “Thank you. For loving that. I really . . . it means a lot to me.”

  Then he was really in danger of starting to cry, which was so very not on his agenda for the evening, so he did the hard thing. Which was to smash a hammer down onto the tender moment before it fucked him up.

  “You might have put Keiko in a tight place,” he said. “The police are going to be real focused on him. Even from across the ocean.”

  The smile faded, and he mourned it, sharply. “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry about that. I’ll try to—”

  “No, you won’t,” he said. “You aren’t doing jack shit right now. You’re running for your life. You can’t help him.”

  She flattened her lips to a bloodless line. “I know. I’m sorry to do this to Keiko. But hundreds of people will survive who might have died.”

  “If there actually is a bomb,” he said, hating himself for it.

  Her eyes flashed. “You think I’m lying?”

  “Never,” he said hastily. “I think you’ve been locked in a hole for six months and forcibly injected with shitloads of a very powerful drug. That’s what I think.”

  “Ah,” she said. “So. I’m crazy, then.”

  “No, Lara.” He sat down on the bed. “I think that you’re fucking amazing. You put me to shame. It’s incredible to me that you’re focusing on helping a bunch of strangers in a train station, after what you’ve been through. I am a pathetic, self-absorbed, jerk-off dickhead compared to you. All I ever think about is poor little me.”

  “It’s not such a big deal.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself. “All they have to do is look for the bag. If there’s no bomb, all they’ve lost is some time. It’s an inconvenience. A stupid bummer of a bomb scare. Worth the risk. Totally worth it.”

  “As you command.” He lifted his hand to her l
ips. “You save the world, and I’ll be your body servant and lady’s maid while you do it.”

  “Oh, stop it,” she said, crabbily. “I don’t like being manipulated.”

  He kissed her knuckles, one by one. “How about worshipped?”

  She snatched her hand away, and swatted him on the chest with it. He caught her hand, by reflex, and held it there, over his heart.

  Her pulse stuttered, raced. His chest felt so hot, with her hand flattened over it. Hot and soft, like something was turning in there, stretching. Unfurling.

  The buzz of hot awareness built and built. So close to just seizing her, just letting that hot prod of lust spur him on and bear her down onto the bed. He was slavering to spread her open, tease another lake of hot, slippery lube out of her sweet flower of a pussy before mounting up for a hard, juicy ride into explosive oblivion. And she was so there with him. He saw it, felt it, smelled it. Lips rosy and parted, nipples tight and peaked, eyes dilated, glowing. Oh. Yes.

  He clenched his jaw, and broke eye contact. Three hard, athletic bouts of sex were way more than enough for the girl who just got rescued from the pits of hell.

  The abandoned plate of food on the bedstand caught his eye, and he lunged for it. “It’s been a couple hours,” he said. “How about you ingest your next shot of calories?”

  She looked at the plate, doubtfully. “I’ll try the rice and veggies,” she conceded. “The meat’s too rich for me right now.”

  “Whatever. As long as it’s something.”

  He watched every bite go down, and felt himself fed. When that was all gone, he let himself be persuaded to polish off the steak, which she insisted she could not eat. He tried to be non-cholant about the erection as he peeled off his clothes and slid in next to her, tucking the comforter up to her chin.

  He switched the light off, and pitch darkness thudded down onto them, pressing in on all sides, charged with menace. All at once, he remembered that she’d been confined in the dark. Thoughtless asshole.

  “Oh, shit, Lara, I’m sorry,” he said, groping for the lamp. “We can leave the light on, if you—”

  “It’s fine,” she whispered, pulling him back down. “With you, it’s fine. You’re all the light I need.”