Daemon

interior security cameras. There – he saw two security people in the grand foyer with Metzer locking the ornate front doors of Hollis’s twenty-three-thousand-square-foot mansion. Metzer was racing upstairs, pointing and shouting to position men at the top of the staircase. They all carried MP-5 submachine guns. The second floor was apparently going to be their Alamo.
    Just then the front doors blasted open sending door hardware, wood and glass fragments silently spraying across the polished stone floor. Something the size of a man had burst through the doors at high speed, taking out the large antique table with fresh-cut flowers just beyond the door and crashing into the far wall where it lay in a smoking wreck. The room started to fill with smoke.
    The video showed twin security men opening fire from the second floor railing. More shadows were already racing through the front door. Hollis couldn’t get a good look at them in the dim lighting and smoke. They moved fast – through the doorway and up the wide staircase. In mere moments they exited the frame. Hollis clicked around in frustration to find a suitable camera to see what was going on.
    He soon saw his own bedroom on one monitor – he’d had this security camera installed as a precaution against sexual assault charges (one never knew what visions of rape young women might dream up after-the-fact). This camera was not on the rotation available to the security team, but here he could see Metzer grabbing Mary by the wrist and pulling her from the bed. She was nude and screaming, but the muscular German was having none of it. On camera Metzer noiselessly shouted at her and pointed under the bed, letting go of her hand as he reacted to something in the hallway.
    Metzer trained his weapon on the door as Mary crawled under the bed behind him and moments later Metzer openedfire on the doorway in short bursts. Through the thick concrete walls of the safe room Hollis could hear the dull thud of the shots less than thirty feet away in his bedroom. A blade of fire stabbed forth from Metzer’s weapon, illuminating the intense expression on his face – but only for a few moments before a dark form raced into frame and lashed out with twin blades in a lightning fast one-two strike that cut Metzer into three sections, head, torso, and legs. The blades criss-crossed again, inhumanly fast, chopping the pieces into pieces. Metzer’s body fell apart like quarters of beef, spraying the room with gore.
    Hollis stared in shock at the screen.
    The dark silhouette of the attacker moved further into the room, twirling the twin blades to shed excess blood – spattering the walls into a macabre modern art display.
    What the camera revealed beneath the emergency lights was a machine – both familiar and alien. It was a powerful racing motorcycle, but it had no rider, just a series of whip antennas and sensors. The entire bike was covered in blades, which bristled like cooling fins along both sides. Where handlebars would normally be, it wielded twin swords at the end of mechanized gambols. The entire length of the machine was drenched in blood, as though it had hacked its way in here through every security man Hollis had. And every inch of the metal appeared to be engraved with symbols and glyphs – like some sort of religious relic.
    The machine stood with the aid of hydraulic kickstands it had extended. After spinning its blades clean, it folded the blades back behind its bullet-pocked cowling. Two more identical machines rolled into Hollis’s bedroom behind it.
    Hollis collapsed into his console chair and stared in incomprehension at the monitor. What he was looking at made no sense.
    Swirling green laser light issued from the headlight assemblies of the bikes. The scene took on the appearance of a laser light show as the beams spread through Metzer’s lingeringgunsmoke and traced brilliant lines along the walls and furniture in the shadows – scanning for something.
    Without warning one of the bikes roared through the bathroom doorway. Hollis could see in the mirror where it crashed through the thin wardrobe room doors. The ornamental doors caved in like paper, and now Hollis could actually hear the muted throbbing of a powerful motorcycle engine just beyond his panic room door.
    It knew he was in here.
    He swiveled his chair to face the solid steel door ten feet away. That door was the only thing that stood between him and a gruesome death. His heart was hammering