Daniel Suarez - Daemon

Boerner leveled a Schmeisser submachine gun at Go Mets!’s back and opened up. To his credit, Go Mets! leapt up like a house cat and spun around, firing wildly with his Thompson. Gragg tried to pump a few rounds in Boerner’s general direction, but Go Mets! was blocking the line of fire.

By the time Gragg circled around and Go Mets! limped to cover, Boerner was moving behind the huge wine tuns again—his evil laugh echoing.

“Fucker, fucker, fucker!” Gragg actually shouted at his flat-screen monitor.

Just then he heard the telltale clink, clank of a German potato masher landing in his general vicinity.

“Fuck!” Gragg ducked down and scurried away, but he was still caught by the blast and went flying across the room. He was suddenly down to 15 percent health.

“Damnit!” He pounded his workbench.

The grenades kept coming, and both Gragg and Go Mets! fell back, firing at nothing in particular. By the time they stopped, they were damn near back at the cellar entrance. Embers were falling down around their ears. Gragg lost another 1 percent of health in fire damage.

Gragg tilted his view upward to see the ceiling fully engulfed in flames. The place was filling with smoke. A beam in the corner collapsed, sending up sparks.

Incredible effects.

Gragg turned his view to Go Mets!’s avatar. The guy looked like hell, swaying unsteadily and wheezing.

Gragg aimed the shotgun. BOOM!

Go Mets! fell dead. Gragg collected his med kit and was back up to 39 percent health again.

PK-ing’s a bitch, fella.

Then Gragg realized he was out of shotgun shells. He also had no grenades left. He switched to his Colt pistol. This was laughable; he was up against Boerner with a peashooter.

Good as dead now. Might as well go out fighting.

Gragg’s avatar ran like a wild man across the burning cellar, firing his pistol at nothing in particular. He ran to the doorway on the far side and jumped over the discarded flamethrower pack. He ran full-speed into the darkness.

It was with considerable surprise that he found himself still alive and moving toward a faint light ahead. He stopped to reload his pistol and then continued.

Soon he reached a circular chamber with a beam of sunlight shining down from a hole in the ceiling, illuminating a section of the wall. It appeared to be the basement of a shattered tower. Several barred windows ringed the walls in the shadows. It was a dead end.

Gragg looked back the way he’d come. No wonder Boerner let him in here—now he was trapped.

Gragg wondered why Go Mets! wasn’t flaming him in the chat window for player killing. Perhaps if any of the first squad survived the diversion attack, he could convince them to move up and help out. Gragg hit the TAB key to bring up the player list. To his surprise, no one else was playing on the server anymore. There weren’t even any spectators—which is what you turned into after getting killed. All thirty-one human players had disconnected. It was strange. He closed the player list. Maybe they were shunning him for player killing?

Gragg’s avatar moved around the dark room. He noticed the wall where the sunlight struck it. There, in the center of the sunlight, a texture map of chiseled stone spelled out a cryptic message:

m0wFG3PRCoJVTs7JcgBwsOXb3U7yPxBB

Gragg stared at it for a while. What the hell?

Just then he heard a familiar voice off to his left: “ Amerikaner .”

Gragg spun left and emptied his Colt in the direction of the voice. It was Boerner all right, standing behind a latticework grate cut into the wall. His shadowy form was partially hidden by the grate. The bullets didn’t seem to have any effect. Apparently the game engine treated the latticework as a solid object—like a bulletproof confessional.

In a few seconds Gragg’s pistol was empty. As he stood there, his gun still aimed at Boerner, the SS officer took out a lighter and lit a cigarette at the end of a long black filter. The orange glow lit up his hawkish, Aryan face for a moment.

The Oberstleutnant’s dark eyes turned to Gragg’s avatar. “You haf played long. Haf you no job?”

Gragg’s jaded eyes widened in amazement.

Who the hell created this map?

Boerner continued to smoke calmly. On a lark, Gragg hit a hotkey for game taunts. His avatar shouted at Boerner: “I think the Germans are out of real men!”

Boerner frowned. “Stop zat nonsense.”

At his computer, Gragg stood up, kicked his chair back and gripped his head in mute amazement. His eyes quickly returned to the screen.

Boerner took another drag on his cigarette. “Are you a brain-dead punk”—he motioned to the text centered in the sunlight on the wall—“or do you haf useful knowledge, yes? If you do, use your key, and ve vill meet again.” He clenched his teeth on the cigarette filter, smiled darkly, then turned and walked away—laughing his (literally) trademark evil laugh. It echoed in the halls.

Gragg watched him go, then turned to face the writing on the wall again. He hit a key combination for the in-game camera to snap a screen capture.

The moment he did so, he was ejected from the game. The Houston Monte Cassino server never appeared in the public listings again.

Ross leaned against Sebeck’s unmarked police cruiser. It was parked on the shoulder of Potrero Road. “Do you need directions to Woodland Hills, Sergeant?”

“Just a brief detour.”

“What is this, the first murder scene?”

“Down that dirt road.” Sebeck pointed back at the closed steel gate. He stood in front of the steel winch box. A police warning tag hung from the winch housing.

Sebeck noticed that the steel cable was coiled on the ground beyond the chain-link fence, stretching out of sight downhill. The county probably lowered it to avoid any additional accidents. “Hang on a sec.” Sebeck keyed a handheld radio. “Unit 992, this is D-19, over.” Sebeck looked to Ross again. “We have a patrol unit guarding the murder scene down below.”

A voice crackled over the radio, “Unit 992, over.”

“I’m at your 20. I need to raise this cable. Is the area clear down there? Over.”

“Ten-four. Area clear, D-19. Over.”

“Stand by. Out.”

Sebeck clipped the radio onto his belt under his sports coat. He produced a ziplock bag from his pocket and unrolled it. It contained keys and a remote control. He removed the keys and flipped through them. He used one to unlock the winch housing. He flipped open the door, then searched for the key to the winch. He inserted the key and turned it in the lock.

The winch motor kicked to life, grinding like a powerful can opener. Sebeck leaned around the side of the winch housing to check the progress of the cable. It wasn’t budging.

Ross looked on from his position at the car. “You turning it the right way?”

Sebeck stopped it. He pointed to the arrows next to the lock. “It says ‘In.’ I’m turning it to ‘In.’ This is ‘Out.’”

He cranked it the other way. The winch paid out a small bit of cable before clicking to a stop. “See? That’s ‘Out.’”

Sebeck cranked it the other way again. The motor ran, but it didn’t even retrieve the small amount he had just paid out. The winch mechanism would not engage even though the motor was running. He stopped it and pulled the key out.

“That’s strange. Although, now that I think about it, the handyman said the cable didn’t come out of the ground when he ran the winch.”

Ross looked puzzled. “The cable was in the ground?”

“Yeah. It was buried in the ground, and the handyman got a faked e-mail from the management company to come over and run the winch.”