Time wuz runnin’ out. It wuz only a day or two until the expected invasion, and Love Chyld and I had run into a wall made out of giant hulking zombies. We needed some help.
First let me tell you a little about the zombies in Paragon City. First you got the ancient dead, generally raised by the Lost Pantheon. They tend to be old soldier husks animated by demonic spirits. Crack shots with a musket, but they don’t tend to stray too far out of the Dark Astoria section of town. I had a feeling even the aliens intended on giving that area a wide berth. I planned on dealing with them after I got a high enough security clearance to tackle ’em.
The second type of zombies are recently animated jumbles of corpses. I still can’t prove it, but I think the noted philanthropist, Dr. Vahzilok, may have had somethin’ to do with ’em. The reason I believe that way is a’cause they always shout his name when I put a slug in their noggins. Anyway, they look more like Frankenstein types than your usual animated corpses. Remind me to show you some pictures of those nasty things sometime. Anyway, this wuz the kind o’ zombie givin’ Love and me our current headache.
You see, we stumbled upon some Vahz type zombies that had actually organized a hijackin’. They stole a whole mess o’ chemicals. My contact, Dr. Sanders, (I told you I wuz on a first name basis with all the nurses in Paragon city, not the Doctors) told me that these chemicals could be mixed in such a way to attack someone’s immune system. She had read in some medical journal that Dr. Vahzilok wanted to use a similar formula to allow people to receive organ transplants with less chance of rejectin’ the new organ. I knew that this wuz bad news.
If the good Doctor got these cans of gunk in the right combination into the water supply, we’d be looking at a swarm of zombies. Let alone people dyin’ of the flu or less. This had to be stopped.
We got a hot tip on a sewer location, and sure enough we found enough zombies to staff Flea World off of ol’ Route 23 back in Kentucky. I hammered into a few scouts with some some recent additions to “Betsy.” The zombies spouted their burnin’ vomit on me. Love Chyld healed me almost instantly, and I cracked off a few more rounds. They just kept comin’.
After a strategic withdrawal to the surface… Ok so I woke up in the hospital again. I decided we needed a bit more firepower. I strolled around Atlas Park lookin’ for potential recruits. Not one decent hero in the mix wuz available. Most of the big time heroes were busy preparin’ defenses for the imminent invasion, so they wuz unavailable as well. Unless we came up with a plan fast, the city wuz doomed before the invasion even started.
That’s when Love Chyld came up with her plan. Some of the heroes runnin’ around town were heroes summoned from the past to assist the future. She figured she had enough of that ol’ time religion to summon up one or two fer us.
We went shoppin’. Since ya’ can’t find your usual summonin’-ancient-heroes supplies at your local Piggly Wiglly (a’sides Paragon City didn’t even have one), we had to hunt in the smelliest ol’ book stores in town. I did manage to find the September ’76 issue of Soldier of Fortune that wuz missin’ from my collection, so I wuzn’t completely bored by the trip. Then we hit Pandora’s Box in Steel Canyon for some smelly durn stuff.
Love took us out to a nice quiet spot in Perez Park. Well, it wuz quiet after we cleaned out a Hellion/Skulls gang fight happenin’ on it. Love explained to me that this was a site of mystical convergence or some other such farkin’ hippy crap. Didn’t matter to me none. I just wanted some back up to clear out those zombies.
We played like Circle of Thorns types and did an ol’ fashioned mystical ceremony in the middle of Perez Park.
A voice called out, “Who summons forth the Keeper of the Vault?”
“I do,” said the hippy.
“Whose aid do you seek?” the voice replied.
“Teddy Roosevelt,” Love replied. I had originally suggested that we summon back Robert E. Lee, but Love said it wouldn’t be politically correct. She ruled out Patton and a few others. I got Teddy by her, since he founded the National Parks service. He knew how to cater to hippies.
“I’m sorry,” the voice began, “but he’s already helping someone else. Do you have a second choice?”
“Alexander the Great?” Love went down the list for about an hour. She even tried ol’ General Lee out of desperation.
After about an hour she finally asked, “Who have you got left?”
“I have only two warriors left in my hallowed halls. The others have all gone on to their final rewards or are in service elsewhere. These two aren’t quite as famous as some of my other charges.”
So we took ’em. I figured they had to be pretty decent types to be in the hall of dead heroes. Anybody in the same place as General Patton and General Lee had to be pretty bad ass in my book.
After a moment we saw a blindin’ flash and two armored figures stood a’fore us.
The first wuz Saint Domina, a warrior in the distant past that had the divine ability to heal the injured. She also had a handy talent of shootin’ death beams out o’ her eyes. Apparently she wuz also very easily distracted by the opposite sex, as we found out soon enough. But that’s another story I’ll tell ya’ about later.
The second figure wuz an imposing warrior with a big ass battle axe. I knew I wuz gonna like him a lot. He wuz Owen Macpherson, a Scottish warrior that had somehow won a great battle for the Asgardian deities. Since Asgard and Scotland both called him hero he had no place to rest. He hoped our battle against an alien menace would gain him enough honor to ascend to some sort of decent afterlife.
We got on the horn to Bureau 13 HQ to get them some clearance. After getting a stern lecture about using non-Bureau issue magical equipment they provided us with some charms that could catch our two new recruits up on five-thousand years of recorded history and the Paragon City super-hero rules and regulations. I wish I had that durin’ my final exams back in high school.
We went back into the sewers armed for bear. Mac, the big Asgardian Scotsman, led the assault as our front line of defense. My belief is that all ranged combat experts like myself should buy the nicest suit of armor you can afford, put it on the biggest warrior you can find, then stand behind him and pick off the ones he misses.
Domina, the saint, had dropped out of her armor. A trip to Franc’s of Paragon had costed me a few bucks, but Domina had insisted on a new wardrobe. Anyway, she now dressed like a French Whore, but she still shot death rays from her eyes and hands. She went in to the sewers right behind Mac.
Love and I went in behind our new recruits. I sniped the nastiest targets as Mac went in with his axe swingin’. Domina and Love supplied support blastin’ away with psychic blasts and death rays, and healin’ Mac and me from any burnin’ zombie puke that got on us.
Let’s just say, with the two newest recruits in tow, we managed to finish off the zombie threat with some minimal fuss. We still didn’t have any concrete evidence to tie in the zombies to Dr. Vahzilok. We still didn’t have any solid plan against the Rikti invasion that wuz due in a little over a day. But we saved the city’s water supply from a nasty zombie cocktail.
We still needed more heroes.
… End Part 5 …
