Daniel Suarez - Daemon

Gragg waved his hand, sending the BMW and its entire escort pack to a screeching halt. Merritt was thrown against the rear window. As the BMW lurched to a stop, Merritt stopped himself from rolling off the end of the trunk.

Gragg flipped his voice to the car’s PA system and pounded his finger into the blacked-out glass in front of Merritt’s face. “You’re a fucking crazy man, Roy! You think I can’t kill you the moment I get out of this car?”

Merritt shook his head. “You’re under arrest!”

Gragg pounded the car seat, laughing. “That’s my boy! Shit, I’ll make you a deal: give me your autograph, and I won’t kill you.”

Suddenly Merritt’s stomach exploded, splattering blood across the rear window. Merritt’s face went slack and his eyes rolled up as his grip on the car released.

Stunned, Gragg watched Merritt roll off the end of the trunk and onto the pavement. Gragg waved his hand and brought the BMW farther down the road, so he could see Merritt, lying in the middle of the street. Another wave of his gloved hands and Gragg cleared a ring of AutoM8s all around him.

Gragg looked up.

A blue helicopter with a yellow logo hovered low behind them, about a hundred feet off the ground. Gragg looked down at Merritt, who was moving now, pulling himself along the center line of the road and leaving a trail of blood. Rage began to build in Gragg. He looked up again at the helicopter, death in his eyes. A man wearing a black hood and holding a sniper rifle kneeled in the open doorway. He looked straight back at Gragg. No Daemon call-out hovered above him.

The Major muttered under his breath. “What the hell are you waiting for, asshole?”

He fired a shot at Loki’s rear window, pounding a divot just next to the kid’s head. But Loki barely flinched. He was looking fixedly down at Merritt, crawling across the pavement. There was a fifteen-foot blood trail now. Merritt was fumbling through his jacket, quivering. Looking for something.

The Major sighed. “Goddamnit…”

He saw two Mexican workers open a salvage yard gate to peer out at all the commotion in the street. The Major gritted his teeth and turned the rifle in their direction. He squeezed off several rounds.

Spouts of blood erupted from the chest of the first worker. The man pitched back into the stunned hands of his companion—who The Major nailed straight between the eyes. They both fell from view.

Then The Major turned the crosshairs back onto Merritt. Merritt was lying on his back, panting doggedly, blood shining on his stomach, while he held two small pieces of paper before his eyes. The papers fluttered in the wind.

Why wasn’t Gragg finishing him? Why wasn’t this over yet?

The pilot’s voice came in over the headset. “We need to go, Major.”

The Major made his decision.

As Gragg stared, suddenly the top of Merritt’s head exploded. Merritt’s body slumped, twitching on the pavement.

“You motherfucker!” Gragg pounded his fists against the glass, staring at the sniper. “You motherfucker!”

Two more divots appeared in the window as sniper bullets slammed into it. Then the chopper banked away and took off low and fast above the factory buildings, heading out over the bay. It was soon lost to sight.

Gragg looked back down at the body in the street. Two small photographs wafted away from Merritt’s dead fingers in the wind.

Ross pulled Philips up onto the quay on the far side of the ship channel. They both crawled to level ground, and after panting for a few moments, Ross looked up.

They were on the edge of a pipe storage yard. He eased Philips up so her back rested against a smooth concrete pylon. She looked dazed.

He turned to face the ruins of Building Twenty-Nine burning beneath a thunderhead of roiling black smoke across the water. A dozen more columns of smoke rose elsewhere in the distance. He could hear sirens wailing all over the city. It was a war zone.

Fireboats approached from the bay.

He knelt down next to Philips and brushed her wet hair away from her face. “Help is coming, Nat.” He felt her trembling. “Are you okay?”

Her lips quivered slightly but she nodded. Her face contorted as she tried to contain tears. “How many do you think we lost?”

He took a deep breath. “Possibly everyone.”

She put a hand to her mouth and started crying.

“It’s not your fault, Natalie.” He put a hand on her arm reassuringly.

“I was in charge!”

“No. You weren’t. We just thought you were.”

She stopped and turned her blindfolded eyes toward him.

“They were never going to let us stop the Daemon, Natalie.”

“You’re talking crazy! The government created the Task Force. We were betrayed by private industry.”

“Private industry is your government. I thought you knew that.”

“How can you say that to me?”

“Because it’s true. Sobol knew it. The Daemon isn’t attacking us, Nat. This is a struggle between two artificial organisms. The Daemon is just a new species of corporation.”

They sat for a moment listening to the distant sirens.

“The old social order is dissolving, Nat. It happens every few centuries.” He looked out across the burning city, then turned back to her. “I won’t let Loki be our future.”

She was trembling, whether from being wet or scared he couldn’t tell.

He brushed his hand along her cheek and eased toward her blindfolded face. His face was only an inch away from hers. She could sense him there.

“I want you to know, every day my first and last thought is of you.”

He removed his hand from her cheek. She blindly glanced around, listening, feeling forward with her hands. “Jon.” A pause filled with the sound of sirens and approaching tug engines. She no longer felt his presence. “Jon!”

The only reply was an echoing, amplified voice from the water. “Are you injured?” A fireboat’s engines throbbed in reverse.

Philips wept on the jetty as the roar of powerful engines drowned out the world.

He floated in the darkness of his mind for what seemed decades. Thoughts came to him only as raw concepts—black despair, vertiginous fear. As he began to coalesce from the emptiness, he slowly pieced together scraps of his personality, regaining some measure of self. His mind no longer floated on a sea of nothingness. It was enmeshed in a carnal vessel again. That vessel was named Peter Sebeck.

He wasn’t sure at what point he noticed someone talking—perhaps they had been there all along—but they kept up a persistent chatter while his mind came into focus in the darkness. At first Sebeck couldn’t distinguish individual words, but as he concentrated they became more distinct.

“…Christ figure is a recurring motif in many cultures; death and rebirth; symbolic turning of the seasons, all that crap. Wyle E. Coyote was a fucking Christ figure, man, and Acme Company was Rome, baby.” A pause. “You can find it in Hindu legend, Sumerian mythology. Shit, you find it in modern folklore, like Rip van Winkle.

“Although Rip van Winkle didn’t die. He slept. But that’s the damned point: death as sleep. Sleep as death. Isn’t our life a cycle of death and rebirth? Sleep and awakening? The promise of eternal life is a threat unless you get to start over. The mythmakers knew that. They weren’t dummies, man.”