Our greatest enemy, of course, is Satan himself. You may have heard mention of “the Rapture” on the mainstream feeds; do not be fooled. It is anything but. I have seen these so-called Raptured with my own eyes. They are infested, brother. They seek the light, but it is not the light of our Lord (you may remember that Lucifer means “bringer of light”). Some kind of demonic tumors grow in their eyes, in their mouths, in their open wounds. It steals away their souls. They are already saved, they say. They have already found redemption. And they are gripped by some evil wanderlust that draws them to wherever Satan’s spawn gather in the greatest numbers.
And there is something else, Neville, something new. You may have heard of the “pingers” and the “stalkers” and the other abominations that walk these streets, preying on sinners and saved alike. I have seen them with my own eyes; they are half flesh and half machine and not remotely human. But just today I saw something that looked and moved like a man, yet was as depraved as any demon. I saw a ghoul, feeding on the flesh of the dead.
It was the color of stone, or clay. For a few moments I thought it might be one of those golems the Jews go on about—they do figure prominently in Revelation, even though they have spurned Christ—but it had metal seams and joints, and a head like a helmet. And its body, Neville, it had such muscles, they shone and rippled and flexed with every movement. I swear, were it not the color of slate it might almost have been you standing there, in the shower at the seminary after practice. But it acted nothing like you, Neville. It was crouched over a pile of corpses and it fed on them through some kind of fang or needle that sprouted from its wrist. I did not get close enough to see the details, but those penetrated bodies—they shriveled up as I watched, Neville. This monster sucked them dry and left nothing but husks of skin draped over bone, like one of the steel vermin that scuttle about these streets draining the dead.
I was transfixed. And before I could recover my wits, this thing turned and looked straight at me. Its face—the air was full of smoke and there was maybe half a city block between us, but I could see that it had red eyes, or maybe just a single great eye. It stood up, still facing me; it must have been nine or ten feet tall. It took a step toward me. I held up my Bible, Neville, I was terrified but I had faith in Our Lord, I held up the Bible to this abomination and it stopped! It just stood there for a moment, watching me, and then—
And then it laughed.
It had the strangest laugh, Neville. It didn’t sound anything like a real voice, it sounded like some kind of primitive machine from the last century.
And it began to move again, toward me.
I confess my faith failed me then. I turned and fled. I must have run for blocks, and when I finally stopped and looked behind me it was nowhere to be seen.
Perhaps it was a golem after all. Perhaps it was the Beast himself that I saw, feasting on fallen souls. I do not know. But it had the shape of a man and the aspect of the Enemy; and while I’ve seen the Devil’s other soldiers wreak much greater destruction, there was something especially intimate about the evil this thing wrought in the streets of this accursed place. Don’t ask me how I know, but I feel in my soul that this ghoul was the most wicked, the most evil of all the satanic forces I have seen here. I pray I never encounter its like again.
But enough darkness! There is so much comfort to be had even in the face of these abominations—for they prove, once and for all, that we were right and the atheist liberals were wrong. The Devil’s minions are everywhere, just as the Scriptures foretold. It is truly a joyous time (perhaps not for the abortionists and the unbelievers—who’s laughing now, Dr. Meyers? ha ha!). The coming of our Lord is at hand.
One of CELL’s Christian soldiers has promised to scan this letter to you as soon as he is able. God bless CELL; they are truly doing the Lord’s work. Perhaps once they vanquish the Devil’s Armies they can do something about the homosexuals, ha ha!
Be well, and rejoice. The Lord is with us always.
What? You think this thing powers itself?
You think I can leap between rooftops, roll Bulldogs single-handed, throw CELL drones around like kittens without draining the batteries? Have you even read the damn specs?
Everything about this suit is a trade-off. You can crank the armor so tight you’re pretty much invincible, but only for a few seconds and you cut your speed in half. You can disappear entirely, just fade right out of the visible spectrum, but the lensing field sucks so much juice the capacitors run dry before you’re halfway down the block. And don’t even talk to me about trying to do any of those things at the same time.
They don’t mention any of that in the ad copy, of course. To hear the brochure tell it, you just put on the N2 and hit the ground at sixty, invisible and invulnerable, world without end a-fucking-men. But all those bells and whistles take power—and the suit may be a hundred years ahead of its time, but the batteries? Let me tell you, sometimes it feels like this thing’s running on a couple of triple-A’s.
They say it keeps you going under normal conditions for almost a week without a recharge. I don’t have to tell you conditions are anything but normal out there. I tapped into the grid on those rare occasions when I could find a grid to tap into. Even then, it was even money whether I’d be able to suck up a decent charge before the extra load blew the breakers over ten city blocks.
The suit’s got a NOM option to metabolize carrion on the battlefield. Cellular ATP gives you almost sixty kilojoules per mole, and that’s not even counting bomb-cal content of the raw meat. So, yeah. I used it once or twice, to keep myself going. I fed off the dead like a fucking tick, and I’m not proud of it.
Still, you can’t deny it makes sense. The grid may go down, clouds may cut you off from your solar sats—but the one thing you’ll never run out of down here is bodies.
Gould isn’t gone. I’m starting to get the sense that Gould is never gone, not really. He’s like one of those mutant unkillable STDs you pick up out in the Gene Zone: Just when you think you’re finally free of it, your dick starts oozing again.
He pops back onto my comm channel as if the dustup at his apartment had never happened, bursting with good news he’s skimmed from forbidden frequencies: some kind of field hospital set up at Trinity. He figures that was where CELL planned to “debrief” Prophet. The good news is that hardware designed to interface with all the suit’s black boxes is pretty much a given.