Daemon d-1

by Daniel Suarez

  Merritt hit Loki’s hood hard, then slid back into the windshield. He rolled left, jamming his foot down onto a brushed metal knob at the corner of the hood, and clamped onto the wiper well with his hands. He braced his other foot against the knob on the far corner like it was a rock-climbing wall.

  He glared into the blacked-out windshield and pointed threateningly. You’re not rid of me yet, asshole.

  *

  From the backseat of the BMW, Gragg stared in amazement at his pursuer now straddling the car hood. “You have got to be shitting me…” He didn’t see that coming. He watched the man like a television show through the glass as the guy pulled an automatic pistol from his coat and aimed at the corner of the windshield.

  A series of muted cracks sounded. Divots appeared in the glass over a several-inch area. Gragg watched this calculated attempt to penetrate his armor with something bordering on admiration. The corners were typically the weakest spots on a bulletproof windshield. It was a cool-headed call-especially with scenery racing past behind him.

  Too bad the glass was three inches of polycarbonate laminate that could stop a rifle bullet. A score of AutoM8s now surrounded Gragg’s BMW in close order like a slavering pack of wolves. Gragg shook his head sadly and shouted at the windshield. “What now, crazy man? You’re on an armored car! What were you thinking?”

  Beyond the windshield the rider had reached down to his shoe and now brandished a killing knife as he braced himself with both feet and his other hand.

  Gragg laughed. “Look out. He’s got a knife!”

  The rider turned, jammed the knife under the bottom edge of a satellite uplink node, and pried upward. The node peeled off with a shriek of bending metal.

  The Voice came over the stereo system. “Uplink…one…of…twelve…has failed.”

  Gragg felt the rage building. “You son of a bitch! You’re going for a ride now!”

  With a wave of his gloved hands, the BMW went into a power slide and the rider was nearly flung off.

  *

  The Major’s chopper came in low and fast over the industrial area, banking so that nothing but brick factory buildings were visible in the left windows. The Major clipped a monkey cord onto his harness and gave it two test pulls. He struggled to his feet as the chopper leveled off. The old wound in his knee was already acting up. An image of a mortar shell landing next to him in a patch of Nicaraguan mud flashed in his mind. Ancient history.

  “There they are, Major!” The pilot pointed.

  Below, the Major could see a red BMW screeching around drunkenly as it raced down the street, alternately braking and accelerating while a man tried to retain his grip on the roof. Twenty more vehicles swirled around the car, moving like a single organism. More vehicles converged on the site from all directions at high speed along cross streets, smashing into the occasional unlucky motorist. People fled for their lives. He shook his head. What a goddamned mess.How had this gotten so out of control? Behind him columns of black smoke rose here and there.

  Let’s give the city something else to look at.The Major pulled his L3 cell phone from his jacket and spoke to the pilot as he started dialing. “It’s days like this that I almost miss working for the government.”

  The pilot’s voice came over the closed-circuit headset. “Almost.”

  The Major laughed. The line picked up. “Project Hazmat.” The Major turned to look back through the atmospheric haze at Building Twenty-Nine in the distance. “Demolition.” A pause. “6-N-G-7-3-H-Z-6.” Another pause. “On my mark. T-minus ten…nine…”

  *

  “We’re almost there, Nat.” Ross glanced back at Building Twenty-Nine, three hundred yards behind them now. It was burning somewhere inside, and the flaming wreckage of AutoM8s around it partially obscured it with smoke.

  Philips spat out salt water. “I think I’m really blind.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What if that was a ZM-87 Laser Blinder? My retinas would be gone.”

  “Doesn’t make sense. Why permanently blind a target you’re about to hack to pieces? It’s probably meant to stun victims. I’d-”

  Suddenly a wave of pressure blasted across their backs. A visible shockwave rippled through the atmosphere and pressed down around them-followed close on by a resounding BOOMthat they felt more than heard.

  They both went facedown in the water as the depths beneath them glowed orange and filled with the sound of splashing boulders and thousands of rock fragments. As they came up sucking for air, rocks and small boulders were landing all around them. Their ears were ringing.

  Ross covered her with his body as the rocks continued to rain down. He turned to see a towering mushroom cloud roiling up from the jagged tops of Building Twenty-Nine’s walls. The structure was a pool of flame with refrigerator-sized blocks of reinforced concrete still tumbling end over end across the runway. Burning debris trailing streamers of smoke sailed down from a thousand feet overhead. Metal sheets spun crazily as they fell. “Jesus Christ!”

  “What happened?”

  “The building. It’s gone!”

  *

  From his perch on the BMW’s roof, Merritt glanced back at a black mushroom cloud rising behind him above the factory buildings. “Son of a bitch…” Later.

  Suddenly Loki accelerated the car, pulling Merritt down onto the trunk, where he stopped himself from rolling off by pushing his foot against the metal knob on the right rear corner. He grabbed on to the lip of the trunk lid.

  Where the hell are the police?

  He jammed the knife blade under another metal knob and tore it up from the sheet metal. The knob dangled by exposed wires until Merritt sawed through them.

  *

  The Voice intoned again, “Uplink…four…of…twelve…has failed.”

  Gragg had eight uplinks left. With triple redundancy he knew he needed at least four to adequately control the car and his army of AutoM8s. He turned around in his seat to see the man mere inches away from his face now-still clinging on. Gragg pounded the window. “That’s it!”

  The man’s motorcycle helmet clunked against the glass, awkward in its bulk as he tried to keep his center of gravity down. In between erratic car movements, the rider quickly pulled the helmet off, tossing it over his shoulder. It was immediately crushed by trailing AutoM8s. The man then pressed his head down against the trunk lid.

  Gragg could now see the rider’s face. “Roy Merritt…holy shit.” Gragg smiled in spite of himself. The famous Roy Merritt-known to every Daemon operative in the world. The man who tackled Sobol’s home defense system and survived-the entire ordeal captured on Sobol’s security cameras. The one and only Roy Merritt was hanging on to Gragg’s car. Gragg was being pursued-and pursued damned well-by the Burning Man himself. He should have known. The son of a bitch had a knife, and he was doing more damage than a squad of corporate military. Gragg couldn’t deny some level of admiration. Merritt had probed Gragg’s defenses, found a hole-one that would be filled in the future-and improvised an exploit. What hacker couldn’t admire the man’s cojones? His instincts?

  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 th
e 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.

  Chapter 45:// Respawning

  Newswatch.com

  Massive Explosion and Fire at Illegal Chemical Dump Kills Twenty (Alameda, CA)-Federal authorities are still combing through the wreckage of an unlicensed hazardous chemical dump on the site of a decommissioned military base near Oakland. A massive explosion and fire there killed twelve undocumented immigrants and injured twenty more.

  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.”

  The clattering of metal tools.

  “They were the ones who invented rhyme and meter-the programming language for human memory in preliterary civilizations. It was a cultural checksum — a mnemonic device. You couldn’t fuck with the code or the rhymes didn’t work; and if the rhymes didn’t work, people noticed. And so the knowledge of a people was passed down intact. It was a shamanic code. If you fucked with the code, then society lost its collective mind. Smell me?”

  A pause.

  “Hey, I think our boy’s coming around.”

  Sebeck opened his eyes and slowly focused on a pasty-faced twenty-something kid sporting a tangled mane of black hair. A few days’ beard shadowed the kid’s neck and climbed higher than usual up his cheeks. This was a hairy guy.

  Sebeck blinked at the overhead lights. He coughed and tried to sit up. A rock-hard surface greeted his elbows when he tried to push up. He immediately abandoned the attempt as his head began to swim.

  The hairy kid leaned in close. “Hey, bro, sit back for a few. You’re still trying to metabolize the meds.”


  Sebeck noticed the kid was wearing a lab coat. He tried to remember where he was. His brain was mashed potatoes.

  Sebeck’s voice croaked. “Where is this?”

  “Phoenix Mortuary Services. I call it PMS.”

  Sebeck tried again to sit up, and he pushed aside the kid’s hands when he tried to help. «Who-» He stopped short; his throat was sore as hell. He put a hand to his larynx. No exterior damage.

  Sebeck leaned to one side and looked around. His eyes tried to focus to a greater distance. He was in a long room with several medical examination tables. Oak cabinetry lined the walls. A strong chemical odor assaulted his nose. He’d smelled this before. Formaldehyde.

  Sebeck snapped alert; the body of an old man lay naked on a nearby metal table. The old man was definitely dead because his body had the pallor and flattened appearance that comes when blood pressure and breath leave the human frame.

  “Where am I?”

  “Like I said, my man: funeral home. That’s where they send dead people. It’s the law. And you, my friend, are legally dead. Got the paperwork to prove it.”

  Sebeck looked around for a few moments more, then brought his gaze back to the kid. “Who are you?”

  The kid wiped his hand on his lab coat, then extended it. “Laney Price. Body prep. I take out the pacemakers and shit like that. That stuff’ll blow up if it goes in the furnace.”

  Sebeck ignored Price’s hand and tried to shake his head clear. He glanced down, then swung his legs over the edge of the table and sat up.

  Price rushed to hold him steady, but Sebeck pushed him back. He glanced down at his own body. He was wearing casual slacks and a pullover shirt. Next to him on the table lay his crumpled prison khakis. He picked them up, balling them up in his fists. That’s right.He remembered now. He had just been executed for murdering federal officers. He was the most hated man in America.