Daemon

they both fell for it, like morons.
    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 serveranymore. 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