Daniel Suarez - Daemon

How the fuck had they done that? It was absolutely the same voice-over artist for Boerner from the original single-player game.

Had this custom map been done by the CyberStorm folks themselves? Gragg was obsessed with reaching the wine cellars again. He had to find out what Boerner was doing there. Only this time he wasn’t going to let that fuck shoot him in the back. Yet he knew only too well that Boerner was a slippery character—not likely to repeat his tactics. Gragg resolved to save grenades for the cellars.

The next round started with much of the usual crew—similarly obsessed folks, cursing this addictive game and striving to take the abbey before dawn broke on another sleepy-eyed workday. This time Gragg made sure to follow in the path of a player whose screen name was Major Pain in the Ass. MPITA was a good player, with quick reflexes and a good grasp of key combinations for jumping, switching weapons, and leaning around corners. Gragg crawled behind him during the flanking maneuver, then stuck close on his tail going into the monastery ruins. He never let him get more than a step or two ahead. MPITA soaked up most of the gunfire from Krauts with Schmeissers and heavy machine guns. By the time MPITA was taken out with a Panzerfaust, Gragg was farther into the ruins than he’d ever gotten without taking serious damage.

He took out the Panzerfaust team with a couple blasts from his pump shotgun—his weapon of choice for this map. A sniper rifle was useless in the close quarters of the ruins.

Gragg then stormed forward, hitting a command key that caused his avatar to shout, “Follow me!” He headed toward the dormitory hall, and that was going to be the next problem.

As he reached the corner, Gragg hit the key combo to lean left. He quickly spotted the MG42 team a hundred feet down the roofless, rubble-strewn corridor. The loader pointed and shouted, and the gunner turned toward him and opened fire just as Gragg ducked back again. Tracers whined past for a moment or two until the Krauts decided to save their ammo.

It was an engrossingly realistic game.

Gragg turned his view to face five other Allied players catching up behind him. This was fantastic. They’d never come this far with so few casualties. That meant only ten of the sixteen had been killed in the assault—a record low. He hit the command keys again, and his avatar shouted, “Charge!”

He raced straight across the hall toward a shallow alcove he knew of, immediately drawing fire again from the MG42 at the end of the hall. He watched his health meter drop quickly to 20 percent by the time he reached the safety of the alcove. The players right behind him tried to follow him into the alcove, but Gragg knew it could fit only one player at a time. Their avatars bumped and jumped against his, striving for cover until the Germans mowed them down. Three other players had hung back under cover, and they exchanged fire with the MG42 until Gragg heard what he was waiting for: silence from the Kraut machine gun. They were reloading.

Gragg switched to grenades and charged forward. As he ran over the corpses of his fallen comrades, he picked up their med kits, increasing his health back to 95 percent. It was an odd genre conceit that fallen players sprouted medical kits like Christmas presents, and that picking up a medical kit would immediately increase the health of injured characters—but right now Gragg was all for it. He wanted Boerner’s head on a stick.

He could see the Krauts wrestling a belt of ammo into the open breech of their gun while he ran toward them. The machine gun barrel steamed ominously.

The detail of this game is fantastic.

Just as the Krauts slammed the breech closed again, Gragg hurled his grenade down the hallway. It was a perfect throw, and the Germans ran shouting from their machine gun nest.

By that time, Gragg had switched to his shotgun, and he pumped two rounds into each of them as they fled the explosion. They dropped with captivating rag-doll physics. When he reached the smoking machine gun nest, only one of the Krauts was still moving, lying on his back with a 3-D texture of blood ostensibly flowing from his mouth—that meant he was 98 percent wounded.

Gragg loved this part. Sometimes severely wounded AI soldiers would surrender.

The injured Kraut held up his hands with melodramatic fear, looking up at Gragg’s avatar. “ Nicht schiessen! ”

BOOM! Gragg wasted him and reloaded.

The other three surviving members of his squad arrived, reloading their Tommy guns. The chat window started rolling fast and furious now:

Sergeant Hairy Balls> Any more grenades?

Your Retarded Brother> Never been this far!

Go Mets!> Loki, we’ll cover u

Gragg smirked. Like hell, motherfucker. He typed:

Loki> Fuk u. I took out the machine gun

A moment, then Sergeant Hairy Balls’s avatar moved toward some cellar steps. The others followed, with Gragg taking up the rear. This was the way he liked it.

Gragg looked down the stairway. That was the entrance to the wine cellar where he’d seen Oberstleutnant Boerner yesterday. He was going to kill that fucker this time.

Should he warn the others? He calculated whether it was better to share the information and increase the chance of success, or risk it all and keep victory for himself. He decided to let them find out the same way he did.

Hairy Balls tossed a grenade into the cellar and chased the resulting explosion, charging inside with his Thompson blazing. Suddenly the doorway filled with an orange glow, and flames leapt out of the cellar with a throaty roar.

Flamethrower. Boerner was holed up in the cellars with a fucking Flammenwerfer. This was suicide. Hairy Balls was already dead.

The other two players started tossing grenades in through the opening. They ducked in and out of the doorway, chased by roaring flames each time. Gragg knew they were taking damage, but they were helping; a flamethrower had only ten blasts.

By the time the flamethrower was exhausted, Your Retarded Brother was dead, and Go Mets! was badly injured. Gragg knew this because a player’s avatar limped when it had less than 20 percent health—and his companion was limping pitifully.

Gragg let Go Mets! grab the med kits from their fallen comrades, since he was of no use to Gragg dead, and they both charged into the wine cellar, guns blazing. Boerner was nowhere in sight.

Gragg hoped it was Boerner they were chasing, since he was running out of ammo. He typed into the chat window:

Loki> Did u see him?

Go Mets!> No

The wine cellar was dimly lit the last time Gragg was here, but now the fires left by the flamethrower illuminated the place pretty well, so they didn’t have to probe the dark corners of the room behind the wine barrels. From experience Gragg knew that wood textures could ”burn” in OTR, so they had to move through here fast, or they might lose any chance of catching Herr OberstLeutnant at all. Gragg glanced up and saw that the beams overhead had caught fire.

Damn! Who designed this level? It’s incredible.

A doorway led through the far wall of the cellar. The exhausted flamethrower pack lay on the stone floor there.

An echoing German voice shouted from that direction: “ Amerikaner! ” It was Boerner, all right.

Gragg rushed forward with Go Mets!, and they took up positions on either side of the doorway. Gragg started leaning in to take a look, when he saw the infamous Heinrich Boerner character stand up from the cover of some crates behind Go Mets!. Boerner was dressed in his trademark SS officer grays with a floor-length greatcoat and an Iron Cross under his chin.

This bastard son of an AI engine had dropped the flamethrower in the exit to make them think he’d left the room, and they both fell for it, like morons.