THE DEMON MAELSTROM: A New Excerpt, For My Patient Fans

For everyone waiting patiently for the release of the second book in my trilogy, here is another excerpt from my work so far. I'm sorry it's been a while since anything new has been released; I've been dealing with issues both medical and personal, and the words simply would not come. However, the floodgates of inspiration seem to have opened again and the words are forming into sentences which are forming into paragraphs, which have formed another chapter of this book.

-- BEGINNING OF EXCERPT --

He was perhaps twenty steps beyond the doorway, outside security camera range, when he suddenly bore to his right and began skirting parallel to the front of the building. He checked his tablet: still within range of their network. He switched apps and pulled up a simple window with a large cartoon picture of a bomb in the middle, in the middle of which was the single word BOOM! He grinned at his own whimsy as he crouched behind a decorative maple tree growing from a hole in the concrete entrance patio. At the moment only he was aware of his charms; soon the whole city would know them intimately. Of course he had to reserve a bit for himself, but that only served to spice up his own experience of the intricate plan now beginning to unfold.

Thirty seconds…

Steam clouded out from his mouth as he huddled near the tree, his gaze now glued to his watch as the digital numbers ticked down the seconds he had left. At the twenty second mark his finger moved to hover over the obscene little picture of the bomb, and at fifteen seconds he mashed it a little harder than he needed to. QX computer code began to stream across the screen, duplicating itself across the invisible data connection into the giant building beyond. Gerald watched the code with a face full of almost childlike expectation; an eager, hungry face that twisted into a grin when he began to see his success in the code.

Inside the building, in the languid atmosphere of the glass guard booth, a warning began to flash on the security camera feed. All three guards glanced up and soon found themselves glued to the screens in a daze of non-comprehension. Each screen blinked, stuttered, then dissolved into strange code that streamed across a dark background. The master intrusion alarm began to sound and red lights lit up the entrance lobby. Tony looked back at the other two guards, his face ashen. “Did either of you two mess with our camera feed data?” The pair of guards shook their heads back at him, their faces equally astonished.

The screens blinked again and then turned white, and a single word appeared in the center of each one: SURPRISE!

Zero and zero seconds.