Daniel Suarez - Daemon

Merritt staggered on blindly. Finally he stopped and tore off his night vision goggles and opened his eyes. Instantly he was blinded by cold water spraying into his face. It felt wonderful. He smelled a combination of gasoline, burnt flesh, melted plastic, and hot metal. He turned in place dizzily—feeling shock creep up on him. He stood in a manicured section of lawn right next to a rising mushroom of orange flame fifty feet tall. The cold water spraying over him made it tolerable to be this close. His men were in those flames somewhere.

He reached for his bone mic, melted against his cheek. “Waucheuer! Reese! Littleton! Report! Kirkson! Engels! Report!” The microphone pulled off in his hands. His earphones were dead under his Kevlar helmet.

His men were gone. All gone.

Merritt was numb. He spun in place to orient himself and saw the mansion blazing white light a hundred feet farther on. He held his arm up and saw that the stock of his MP-5 had melted onto the back of his sleeve. His nylon web belt containing ammunition clips had melted into his jumpsuit and Kevlar body armor. He wasn’t sure whether he was badly injured, but his temper was beginning to flare. He decided to go with it.

Merritt grabbed the gun’s barrel with his left hand and wrenched the twisted mass free from his arm. The Nomex appeared to have protected him from the worst of it, but he felt the confused buzzing in his nerve endings that was the neurological equivalent of “Please Stand By For Pain….”

Merritt started running, not toward the perimeter wall and safety, but toward the mansion. He raced for the fenced-in pool area and a set of white French doors with polished brass handles—its windows blazing light. His eyes never left it as he leapt over stone benches and herb gardens.

Around him, in the sprinkler wash, he smelled gasoline again, and he heard the whoosh of flames racing to overtake him, but he outran it and stayed in the cool clear water that served as a buffer against the flames reaching the house.

As he ran, Merritt clutched at his back for the sawed-off shotgun strapped there. He was still tugging on its rubberized pistol grip, trying to free it from the melted mass of his web belt, when he kicked in the wooden pool gate. Metal gate hardware clattered across the paving stones—but he was already smashing through a field of teak wood patio chairs and flipping tables in his quest for the French doors. Almost there. He was vaguely aware of spotlights focusing on him from the house, but he didn’t give a damn what Sobol was up to. He might drop dead once he got there, but he was getting inside that house.

He whipped out his Mark V knife and slashed the melted bits of the web belt from the shotgun. To save time he hurled the knife ahead, where it stuck quivering in the door frame. He drew the Remington 870 shotgun into his gloved hands and chambered a round with a satisfying click-clack.

Merritt hit the door hard with his booted foot—and damn near shattered his shinbone. His forward momentum sent him hurtling into the door, where his knee came up into his mouth—driving a sharp nail of pain straight to the center of his skull. He staggered back and reflexively wiped the back of his glove across his mouth. It came back covered with blood. His front teeth felt loose.

Doesn’t matter.

Merritt leveled the shotgun at the door handles and blasted a foot-wide hole in their place. He chambered another breaching round and quickly blasted similar holes at the top and bottom where the doors met—the most likely spot for reinforcing bolts.

Hundreds of yards away, the FBI camp was pandemonium. Agents and police scrambled to gather rescue gear while others scrambled to order no one to go anywhere near the site of the attack. It was a disorganized mess. Somewhere in the chaos Trear heard distant shotgun blasts.

He shouted, “Who’s shooting? Decker, order them to cease fire!”

“Com is down.”

Merritt rammed his shoulder into the French doors, bashing them in. He stumbled into a neo-mission-style entertainment room with wide-plank wooden floors. There was a sunken area of sectional sofas in front of a large plasma screen television. The lights here blazed brilliantly, practically blinding him. Nonetheless he craned his neck and weaved from side to side. He knew what he had to do.

The bomb disposal team was taken out by weaponized acoustics, and he wasn’t going to let that happen to him. Merritt raised his shotgun and noticed half a dozen different sensors spaced along the ceiling over each wall—behind the brilliant lights.

A clear and commanding voice called from the doorway leading farther into the house. “You don’t belong here!”

Merritt’s response came out reflexively. “Fuck you, Sobol.”

Merritt heard footsteps approaching him over the wooden floor. It was uncanny. There was definitely the sense that someone was there. A change in the echoes of the room. That’s when Merritt felt as much as heard the deepest sound he’d ever experienced pass over and through him. The nearby coffee table started vibrating so badly that the glass panels fell out of it.

Merritt twisted to look back up at the ceiling and noticed a reflected LED light pulsating on the back of one of the round sensor pods. He raised the shotgun just as an ungodly feeling of horror gripped him. His intestines were trying to strangle him, and he felt his eyes preparing to explode. He screamed in agony and fired the shotgun.

Immediately the pain stopped. Merritt paused for a second to lean over and vomit on the floor, but he was immediately back up. His eyes and nose were bleeding, but he wiped it away and swiveled around to blast another Hatton round into an identical sensor on the far wall. Then the interior wall. He swayed as he pulled more shotgun shells from his cargo pants pockets and started reloading the Remington. Blood dripped onto his fingers from his nose.

“You son of a bitch! I’m going to shut you down, Sobol!” Merritt slid a shell into the magazine. “You hear me?” His words echoed in the big house.

A voice right behind him said, “There’s no need to shout. I can hear you.”

Merritt jumped and turned around, letting loose a shotgun blast into the wall behind him.

The voice was still there, just inches from his face. “I see you got past the firewall.”

How the hell was this possible? The sound was appearing in midair. No stereo could possibly do that. Merritt scanned the arrays of sensors again, but none were visibly active.

The voice was right in his ear, whispering. “They knew you would die, but they sent you, anyway.”

Merritt jumped away, twisting his gloved finger in his ear as though an insect had flown into it. “Son of a—”

Merritt let the shotgun hang from its shoulder strap while he drew one of his twin P14-45 pistols. The voice continued in his ear, but there was no pain. No agonizing constriction of his intestines.

“They’re willing to sacrifice you to find out what I’m capable of.”

“Keep talking, asshole.” Merritt stood in formal range stance—aiming at the ceiling sensors. He started shooting them out, one by one, waiting a second after each shot.

“Did they even tell you—”

The fourth shot cut him off. A reflective, white plastic panel shattered as the bullet hit it. The voice was gone. Merritt shot out another identical sensor on the far wall, then flipped the safety on the pistol, holstering it. “Blah, blah, blah.”

Merritt noticed his reflection in a mirror over the mantel as he walked farther into the room. His whole face was crimson red and covered in blisters, with the headset melted onto his cheek. His Pro-Tec helmet had protected his scalp, but the whites of his eyes were shockingly blood red—and blood trailed down from his nose over his burnt chin. The Nomex hood and suit had kept him alive, but he might soon be entering cataleptic shock. The dizziness came at him in waves. He felt the rage building in him again. His men had had much worse.