Daemon

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 herblindfolded 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,