Daemon

Gragg slowed down as the GPS latitude coordinate clicked to match his target. Longitude was still a decimal off, though. Gragg checked the compass reading. That meant left. He pulled the car over to the entrance of the parking lot, beneath the bright streetlight, and looked around.

There were a couple of battered mailboxes near the entrance-the larger sort that rural companies and farmers used. Gragg squinted to read the writing on the side. The nearest had "Nasen Trucking" stenciled on it in a sans serif font. The other box had one word on it in black Gothic lettering: Boerner.

Gragg's throat tightened. He looked to the left, where a gravel road ran past Nasen Trucking, into the woods-into darkness. He was exposed, sitting in the light like this. He cranked the wheel to the left. The power steering screeched in protest, and Gragg gritted his teeth. If he hadn't alerted anyone before, he sure as hell had now.

He accelerated down the gravel road and out of the light. The stones crunched under his tires and dinged off his tire wells. The sound reminded him of his childhood and long prairie driveways. Once out of the cone of the streetlight, he slowed to five mph and sca

Gragg fumbled around in the darkness and found his rucksack. He unzipped it and pulled out night vision goggles. Untangling the headband, he then pulled them over his head and powered them up. He sca

The edge of a single-story cinderblock building was visible a couple hundred feet down the road. There were no lights there. A single, thick chain spa

Gragg looked at the GPS unit. He was still one decimal off. He put the car in gear and, with some trepidation, let it roll forward without putting his foot on the gas. He sca

He was on station.

Gragg hesitated for a moment, then turned off the engine. Suddenly he could hear the woods. He heard the clattering of naked tree branches in the wind. Leaves scraped across the gravel road with each gust. The interior of the car cooled rapidly.

Gragg pulled the Glock 9mm pistol out of his rucksack and then freed the pistol from its holster. He placed it on the bench seat beside him.

What the fuck am I doing out here?

It was starting to seem like a really bad idea. He was ru

How did this place have anything to do with the Monte Cassino map? There wasn't any light out here. Was there even electricity? Gragg craned his neck to look up through the windshield and accidentally bumped the single night vision lens against the glass. He straightened the goggles and looked again. An electrical feed line ran along the road on the left side. Narrow utility poles of gray, cracked wood supported it every hundred feet or so.

Following the line with his eyes, Gragg noticed something interesting ahead: a fairly tall ante

Gragg took a deep breath. He was jittery. Time to concentrate. He pulled his laptop bag from the backseat and cleared space on the seat beside him. He put the pistol on the dashboard, then unzipped the laptop bag. He unpacked his laptop and booted up, flipping up the tiny ante

While the laptop booted up, he kept looking around in the darkness. He could actually see pretty well once his eyes adjusted. There was some moonlight.

After what seemed an eternity, the logon dialog came up, and a minute later Gragg launched NetStumbler. The program sca

The signal appeared to originate from the cinderblock building. Gragg's jitters returned. Had he really done this? He tried to calm his rising fear. What was he doing? He thought about it.

There was an OTR server here.

He configured his Wi-Fi card to use the SSID, and soon Gragg obtained an IP address on the unsecured network. He didn't even bother to explore. Instead, he closed NetStumbler and ripped open his CD case. He flipped through the CD-Rs until he found one marked with felt pen "OTR." He slid the CD into the laptop's drive and launched Over the Rhine. He clicked quickly past the opening screens, then selected multi-player mode. He let the game scan for available servers. Only one appeared in the server list: the Houston Monte Cassino server. This was the one visible to his wireless card.

Gragg smiled, then double-clicked on the name. The map started to load. Oddly, the weapon selection dialog box never appeared. Soon, Gragg's avatar was standing, unarmed, in a trench at the base of the Monte Cassino mountain. Normally he'd work his way around to the left, but without weapons it was rather pointless. Gragg peered over the lip of the trench, and he could see the familiar German MG42 nests up at the edge of the ruins.

Strangely, the Krauts didn't open fire immediately. Gragg let his avatar stand there for a moment, and still no tracer bullets came streaming down. He decided to push his luck and hopped up on the fire step-then out into full view.

Still no gunfire. The Germans just sat there.

Gragg started walking toward their lines. He had never approached the monastery successfully from this angle, and now he could see three machine gun nests aiming down at him from a hundred meters away. The gun barrels followed him as he walked, but still they did not fire.

Gragg kept walking, straight up to the center machine gun. The loader crouched next to the gu

To Gragg's shock, the gu

The Unterfeldwebel brought Gragg through a maze of rooms and splintered wreckage. Around each corner were more Kraut soldiers clutching Schmeissers or ma

Gragg was led down into the same cellar where he'd first encountered Boerner in the Monte Cassino map. They walked between the wine casks toward the doorway in the opposite wall. Torches lit their way, flickering against the darkness under the influence of a digital breeze. Gragg glanced around. There was no sign of the fire damage from the earlier game.