Fatal Strike (McClouds & Friends #10)(3)

Too bad the shield didn’t block out his sensory overload problem. But no, that torrential info dump ran on a different channel. With his senses ratcheted up like that, normal everyday life was torture. Perfume, cigarettes, and car exhaust made him gag. Intimate olfactory data about the hormonal and emotional states of the bodies of the people he encountered was embarrassing. Traffic was ear-splitting. Electric lights, God help him. Worst of all, the electromagnetic radiation of wi-fi generated a hot, prickly buzz in his head that turned the chronic headache into stomach-churning agony. And he was a computer geek by trade, for God’s sake. This was a game-changing professional handicap. There were drugs he could take, but to make a dent in a problem this big, he needed a dose so high, it turned him puddle-of-drool stupid.

Of course, things were a little different since the dream girl started her yummy therapeutic visits to his fortress. The head sex seemed to have increased his bandwidth, improving the info dump to a point he might almost define as bearable. But who knew if he could tolerate wi-fi, electrosmog? He had yet to put his laptop and router to the test. He had left them hidden under the body of his truck, in the woods, swathed and sealed in plastic.

He wasn’t sure if the sex fantasy-fueled improvement was a positive sign, or another symptom of impending insanity. It was problematic on so many levels. At least the shield made it easier to be stoic about head pain. He still felt it, it still sucked, but it didn’t make him panic. It was just pain. He breathed into it. It was easier, out in the woods. Sensory data still flooded in, but the data was clean, balanced. Nothing made his head explode. At first, he’d retreated to his own mountain property, but his friends kept coming up to nag. He had to retreat deeper to avoid them.

He’d sucked down some books on wilderness camping before he came up here, and packed up all the macho gear the McClouds had equipped him with over the years—guns, ammo, all-purpose belt knife, etc. The gear was all part of the McCloud guys’ ongoing quest to transform Miles from a basement-dwelling geek freak into a kick-ass battle-ready commando like them. They’d made some progress over the years, but those guys wouldn’t be satisfied until he was prepared to sew up his own bullet wounds with dental floss. As f*cking if.

Thinking too much. Cut that shit out. Concentrate.

The rock face shifted back into focus. He felt the energetic pulse of every living thing near him, vibrating in a shimmering energy field. Lichen rasped beneath his fingertips. Every bird, every bug a bright spot on the 3-D grid in his mind. The cougar was a hot glow of pulsing energy. Staring up like she wanted something from him. Something he just couldn’t give.

That made him think of Lara. Bad idea, dangling from a cliff face. And then he wasn’t just thinking of her. He saw her. Actually saw her in his head, even though his eyes were fixed on the rock face, his hands. Sliding through those grinding gears, just like she did in his nightly sex dreams, as bright a spot on his sensory grid as the living, breathing cougar. Inside his inner sanctum now, looking around. Curious, expectant. Big dark eyes alight with fascination. He saw her so clearly.

The fear grew, penetrating his shield, vibrating in his stomach, his limbs. He was not guiding this image at all. It was unspooling on its own, but he wasn’t dreaming. He wasn’t even daydreaming. He was screamingly wide awake, hyper-conscious, hanging onto a cliff.

Like, what the f*ck?

His shield flickered, and shock of raw panic blasted through him, whiting him out—

He came to sliding rapidly down the wall. Barely caught himself on a narrow ledge of granite with a bone-jarring thud, fingers clawed—

Focus. Don’t look down. His feet dangled, swung, over nothing.

It took a few flailing, panicky moments, to find the frequency, get the shield back up. There it was. Hard as ice. Chill. Empty. No think.

He looked down at the jagged boulders hundreds of feet below, bare toes wiggling in the foreground as they searched for purchase. Blood, smeared on the rocks. He’d scraped all the skin off his fingertips.

It took many long, shaking, straining minutes before he found a jut of rock with his foot, and could lift himself enough to move, think straight enough to recalculate a fresh route.

He made it to the top somehow, limbs hollow and limp when he got there. He had named this rock formation “the Fork,” today’s destination being the top of the tallest, sharpest tine. He stood on the summit and took in the towering forest of conifers, the snow-dusted Cascades, the shreds of moving clouds above and below. Right now, he almost enjoyed the info flood, when every single piece of data was harmonious with the rest. Except for he himself. His fingertips oozed blood. And his cock was still hard, from that not-exactly-a-dream.

He pushed the thought away, and gnawed some jerked elk meat Davy had given him, a relic from their hunting trip last year. A thinly disguised campaign to force Miles to learn to shoot a rifle properly, a necessary rite of passage, according to Davy. Davy himself was a great sniper. Mostly, Miles surmised, because the guy could shut down his emotions at will. Miles had not been great at it. Too nervous, too twitchy. He couldn’t find that still place between the thoughts, breaths.

Well, he’d found it now. The new, chill Miles would be a good sniper. Technique, angles, wind drop, that shit was just math, and he was good at math. If he ever needed to waste somebody at two kilometers, he was all set.

He had no more misadventures on the long, slow way down, but he was exhausted by the time he got back to his rough campsite, which consisted of a tarp tied over his sleeping roll and pack, a fire pit, and a small gas burner. Too tired to cook. He built a fire, chomped a protein bar without enthusiasm. He’d get scurvy if he went on like this, but foraging for edible plants did not engage his brain in the excellent way that climbing did. And all that chewing, Jesus. It made his jaw sore.