Arresting a prominent and controversial religious leader in the middle of Manhattan would be a controversial move. A demon in disguise who would only profit from chaos? It was a disaster in the making. Roger Marthan did his utmost to turn his arrest into a media spectacle and a PR nightmare, as he used his demonic powers to entice the MP that came to pick him up into beating him in public.
That triggered a carefully and, sorry, devilishly wrought plan to drag all involved entities further down the mud. A series of hacked websites and automated messages shot to several social media influencers and media outlets, containing private information those influencers and reporters would rather prefer to keep confidential along with misleading information pointing at the wrong source. The demon made it seem like hackers had invaded the DoD servers and liberated information the federal agency had on these citizens, inflaming public opinion against the government, more precisely the law enforcement agencies and the military.
Messages of “Release Pastor Marthan”, “Beware the Orwellian police state taking over the US”, “Are we still in the land of the free?”, and even “Satan Rules” started to pop everywhere from fake social media profiles dormant in botnets and click farms in Indonesia, Russia, China, and Malasia.
Roger Marthan fully expected the government to arrest him without evidence – his demonic magic guaranteed there was none – and prepared for it in advance. The demon was fully aware of how to use modern technology to promote chaos and dissent, despite expectations of the contrary. And he knew he was invulnerable. What only mattered was making people commit sins, damn themselves, make deals for demonic power. Obtaining Catherine’s soul was near the bottom of his priority list. XXI Century Earth was just too juicy to leave behind.
----------------------------------------
“Mr. Marthan is under custody, sir!” An aide reported to the colonel. “He’ll be on-site in thirty minutes.”
They must be redirecting traffic to make such a good time, Cat thought to herself.
“Colonel, the man is a skilled con man. You can assume he can convince whoever talks to him directly of anything,” she warned. “You should have people off-site cross-examine his statements and the reaction of the personnel who’ll have any direct contact, visual or verbal with the target. He will exert his influence on them.”
“I’ll be waiting for a report, colonel. Miss Wallenstein, thanks for your cooperation,” the general said before the videoconference was cut from his side.
They were “invited” to sleep in guest accommodations at the military base. They weren’t under arrest but given the delicate situation, they were “kindly” requested to stay on-site for ease of access should the army need any information from them. Cat called Agatha and made sure her lawyer was up to speed on her situation.
In the lobby of the guest building, the three of them sat to talk.
“Well, enjoy the experience of staying in a military base,” Jack joked. “Don’t worry about them, they know their jobs. You did great out there, Catherine. Let’s hope the interrogators can get anything out of the… evangelist,” the ranger lieutenant snickered.
Cat’s phone started to ring with notifications. She opened it and saw the media shitstorm hit the internet. Even with double-factor authentication, her own Facebook profile was hacked and vandalized. Footage of Catherine in Dr. Hill’s building moments before she committed suicide was posted online, with subtitles and speech bubbles that painted her actions in a very bad light. As if she did that to draw attention to herself.
After sending a message to Agatha telling her to avoid the Streisand Effect [1], Cat put her phone in airplane mode, to stop receiving the notifications. It was impossible to remove what was published online, she could only hope to weather the storm.
They spent two days in the military base while they interrogated Roger Marthan. After that, they were brought back to the meeting room with the colonel. Just by the officer’s face Cat could the demon managed to fool them.
----------------------------------------
“Nothing,” the colonel admitted. “We got nothing. He didn’t ask for a lawyer, he didn’t claim his constitutional rights, nothing. It seemed like he was mocking us and taunting us into torturing him. Every time he spoke something was to proselytize his faith. Eventually, we had to let him go.”
The shitstorm on the internet was still raging. Everyone’s recommendation page on Youtube had at least five videos related to the unfair arrest of a prominent religious leader by the government. Under pressure from civil rights groups, the ever-growing followers of the “Church of the Theoretical Satanist”, and even the Congress, they had to let the man walk free. Actually, the demon in disguise.
“Here’s some footage of his interrogation,” he continued and an image of Mr. Marthan in a nondescript interrogation room showed on the big TV screen. Seeing the demon for what it was and infused with an irrational fear of going to hell, Catherine started to scream as she panicked inside the girl’s head, throwing Cat’s focus out the window. As the demon in the video spoke, she had to cover her ears. It was of no avail as the words sounded like he was right next to her.
The demon stared at the camera. “Greetings, Catherine. I know you’re watching this right now. How are you doing, knowing you are about to die? If you are ready to make a deal for your soul, call me. Let’s make it like that movie, Beetlejuice. You know my name. Say it three times, and I’ll come to make the offer of your lifetime.”
Every time he spoke in her presence, some magic came along with the words. As she raised her head and looked around, she only saw people concerned about her. It didn’t seem any of them heard the message she did, proving there was something supernatural in the footage. Besides, how would he know which particular video segment would be shown to her?
She couldn’t look at the screen without Catherine having a panic episode. She said she couldn’t resist it, the feeling was as if every blood vessel of her non-existent body was pulled out of her at the same time. Cat shuddered.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Sir, Catherine has a panic attack every time she sees that man,” Jack said.
“I know. We are aware of what happened at the TV station last month. We were just making sure it was real,” the officer admitted. Asshole, Cat thought.
After that, they showed some footage from Guantanamo. The logs showed the escapee’s door opening twice as one soldier who died in the jailbreak went to the cell, opened the door for no reason, closed it, waited for a while, then opened it and closed it before leaving. It was nonsensical footage if Catherine didn’t have another episode.
“Pause the video!” She shouted as she averted her eyes. Cat glanced at the screen but got no reaction. “Can you move it back to when the door is open? Imagine there’s an invisible person entering and leaving the room, try to pause at a moment they would be on camera if they weren’t invisible.”
“Cloaking technology?” One of the nerdy officers whispered to another, earning a glare from the colonel.
After going back and forth, they found a frame that sent Catherine screaming with barely a glance.
[I’m sorry to put you through this,] Cat grumbled to herself, then said to the soldier controlling the video, “Can you extract this frame as an image? The best resolution you can. Wait, it is better to extract two seconds worth of frames on both sides of this timestamp.”
The soldier looked at the colonel, who answered with, “Get this over, quickly.”
While they extracted the frames, Cat lowered her head until it almost hit the table. [I’ll need you to look at the frames with the demon, do you think you can do it? If we can somehow prove he was there in Guantanamo, it will gain us the help of the military.]
[Catherine, please. I’m sorry to put you through this, but we need to get the demon on camera.]
the ghost pouted.
[We need to do it. Sorry, but this is what I can do to help.] Cat subvocalized and fetched the alprazolam in her purse. Everyone had a glass of water in front of them so she took two pills. It would mute her anxiety and most emotions along with it for most of the day but she hoped it would also mute Catherine’s reactions. The potent anxiety medication was already taking effect when the slideshow was ready.
Using Catherine’s panicked screaming, she identified the start and end of the demon’s appearance on camera. Or non-appearance, as the images showed nothing unusual to the mundane eyes.
“Send the images to process. I want to know if there’s anything hidden in there. Any noise, anything,” the colonel said.
----------------------------------------
Outside the military base, the world watched as a section of Jacksonville was cordoned off to let the monstrosity pass. After another two failed attempts to stop him that ended with a lot of wounded and dead soldiers, the military tried an airstrike south of Saint Augustine. While the escapee was severely damaged, he healed after a while and continued moving north, leaving a ruined interstate behind. Now they were just making sure there was nothing to attack in his path and the man-turned-demonspawn was happy to ignore stuff, not in his way.
But they couldn’t block the media or “concerned citizens” from recording the mutated man’s passage through populated areas, like Jacksonville. Pictures of him were everywhere on the web and it was growing almost impossible to hide what was going on. Eventually, the whole circus would come under public scrutiny. Even if the military stamped a top-secret label on it, there was a lot to be gained regarding public support for those interested in such things, like those currently campaigning for a Congress seat.
Several politicians clamored for disclosure on the nature of the “Florida Walker” as the escapee from Guantanamo was being called on the media. So far the connection between the prison break and the entity crossing Florida hadn’t been made but it was a matter of time. Surely some conspiracy theorists online had guessed right already but it hadn’t gained traction with the mainstream media.
----------------------------------------
The next day, Cat had an idea. After asking Agatha to find and hire the right person, she sought the Colonel and asked permission to bring a Blender artist who also drew heavy metal and fantasy illustrations. Some negotiation and she got clearance to bring the artist on site. The poor (and ridiculously well paid) man was saddled with the scariest NDA Rothman & Sullivan could cobble together and also a contract with the military as a civilian consultant, which also included a lot of ways scarier provisions should he say anything about this job to anyone.
He was taken to the base guest housing, along with his technological gadgets, including a 3-D resin printer.
“So, Kayden,” Cat explained it to him after all the paperwork was behind them. “I need you to draw an original character to me, and then make a 3-D model of it. You already received your advance payment, and the other half will be yours once we’re done here.”
“I understand, Miss Wallenstein.”
They took six full and tiresome days to make a sketch of the demon’s real form. It was hard because Catherine had to tell her host what the monster looked like, then Cat had to convey that to Kayden, make the corrections, and adjust everything.
With the 2-D drawings done, Kayden started work on the 3-D model. Another week went by with small adjustments before they printed a demon miniature. More importantly, they now had a 3-D computer model to match against the invisible invader pictures.
----------------------------------------
Meanwhile, the “Florida Walker” moved north along the interstate 95, inexorably and without stopping to eat, drink, sleep, or anything. He already passed past Richmond but the proud military decided he would not make it through Washington, D.C. In hindsight, they should’ve made that decision a week before and then dropped a tactical nuke on him while he crossed a less-populated and easily evacuated area somewhere either in North or South Carolina. They didn’t take the alternative with the least amount of deaths, unfortunately.
They did evacuate the site where they would fight the Walker. The military selected Doswell, Virginia, a small community with less than two thousand inhabitants in Hanover County. After the Walker moved a mile past the town center, the military started dropping the bombs and artillery shells. It was a dark day for the country. Once the smoke cleared, a distorted and burnt blob of blesh slowly reformed itself. At the first sight of movement, they resumed the attack, using incendiary rounds and then dropping napalm on the target. The terrorist was classified as an enemy combatant and not a civilian target, which made it okay to use the dreaded jelly on him.
It was okay too by the demonspawn's standards. Those forged in Hell’s energies, unironically, were extremely resistant to fire. All the napalm did was reduce visibility for the artillery spotters.
The attack lasted for hours. The demonspawn was constantly regenerating as it was attacked by the conventional weapons. Worse, every time he regenerated his shape became less and less human as the mortal flesh gave place to the magical demon flesh. Regenerating also sapped the reserves of magic stored in the Walker’s body but nobody was aware of that.
Night fell and the bombing stopped. For a whole mile, the interstate burned. Fire trucks on both sides attempted to keep the fire contained and away from populated centers. Searchlights sought the demonspawn, but he was long gone. On one of its last mutations, the Walker was no longer just a walker. He gained leathery wings upon which he took to the skies and flew north.
In his mind, a single goal. Kill Catherine.
----------------------------------------
[1] Streisand Effect: Named after the Hollywood actress. Basically, the more one tries to suppress something online, more attention is drawn to that thing. There’s a Wikipedia article on the subject.