The Sound of Distant Thunder { Watty Awards 2012 }

Chapter 15

Ezeziel concentrated a moment and utilized his great, though somewhat depleted, power to amplify the feeble healing abilities of this bald ape he had the misfortune of possessing.  He rolled to his knees and laboriously stood as the bones snapped and crunched as they reformed.  Just as he was stretching the last of the stiffness from his muscles, several patrons came staggering from the bar to investigate the power outage.  Perfect.  Ezeziel needed a snack.

“Hey buddy, you know what’s goin…”  He never finished the sentence.  Ezeziel grasped his shoulders and yanked him closer.  He buried his face in the drunks’ soft neck and bit.  A gaping hole opened in his neck as the demon tore out his trachea and began chewing the mouthful.  Ezeziel ate with gusto and abandon, slurping and chomping noisily.  Behind him someone screamed in abject terror. 

Ezeziels’ true form fed off that with nearly as much wanton gluttony as his physical form was with the hapless partier. 

Strength.  He needed strength for the fight ahead and the hot blood of this bald monkey would have to suffice.  He dropped to his knees with the corpse and finished sucking most of the blood from his carotid artery.  Without pause he ripped the shirt from the bloody torso and bit a huge chunk from the pectorals.  As blood coursed down his chin and he swallowed the chunk of barely chewed flesh he heard a rumbling off in the distance, then a throaty roar which quickly grew in volume and intensity.

Brian banked the big bike onto Second Street and snapped the throttle back, the roar issuing from the machine became a scream as he slammed through the gears.  His heart throbbed as he tore into battle.  This was what he was meant for.  This was his purpose.  A cold, hard smile darkened his face and his blood rose.

“FLIR!” Brian barked.  The computer recognized the command and sensors embedded above the Lexan face shield activated and projected the collected image onto the interior of the faceplate.  The Forward Looking InfraRed or FLIR imaged heat signatures.  The hotter an object, the brighter the color became.  First and second generation units were large and suited for mounting in vehicles.  Third generation units were hand held, but resolution was poor.  Brian’s FLIR was a prototype he had designed himself.  There were four sensors, one at each temple and two in the forehead, which fed four distinct sets of data to the computer buried in the back of his armored torso.

The computer itself was a remarkable piece of engineering.  Its processor consisted of four Intel quad core duo processors running in parallel.  That tremendous processing power received the four channels of sensory input, enhanced it and then overlaid the image on Brian’s faceplate by activating an incredibly thin layer of electro-reactive crystals.  The image was bright enough to enhance what he could see, but not so bright that it would wash out the exterior view.  It worked well in twilight or low light situations.  Dark corners were difficult to hide in when your adversary could see your body heat.  It worked even better in no-light situations.  Brian had trained extensively to navigate utilizing the two dimensional image.  His guns were all fitted with infrared laser sights which the FLIR picked up easily. 

Beyond the FLIR system the armor had a passive target acquisition and tracking system that followed Brian’s’ eye movements and coordinated them to targets he would designate by simply saying “mark”.  The computer saw what Brian saw via a tiny pair of pinhole cameras mounted just above the FLIR sensors on his temples.  Once a target was marked, its position and any other object within Brian’s view were displayed on a small tactical map on the helmets’ faceplate.  The images were placed below Brian’s field of view, but high enough that a quick glance gave him positional information on every target he’d marked.  As long as the target remained in the area, the computer would constantly update the position of each target.  A nice tool in fluid and fast moving situations where multiple targets mingled with any number of civilians.  Finally he had a pair of motion sensors mounted in the middle of his back and chest armor.  They were cued by body heat as well and targets were displayed as dots in a box on the lower right section of his faceplate.  The range was only about fifty feet, but it provided three-hundred sixty degrees of coverage.