Meanwhile

Dark. He sat up. Nothing. Still dark. His gut hurt. Oh. And his sinuses. How terrible. This life sucked so far. The first thing in thirty years he’d enjoyed and it nearly killed him. Crap.

His legs hung off the cot. He’d seen some guys get up from the cot. Others. Too many others. He dripped. Sweat or blood. Both. Fever was back. He saw the clock. It was deep in the night now. He swallowed four aspirin and a tramadol. Life kept getting better and better.

He wanted to shoot the gun. He wanted to drive the van. He wanted to learn karate or whatever. No, you hold the camera, they said. Safer. Yeah right. This was safety he didn’t need. Pain safety. Hospital safety. No. Not even a proper hospital. Mercy’s backyard surgery and prescription drug center. A flophouse for half dead building jumpers.

Where were they? It was jolly of them to leave him alone, screaming in pain. No babysitter. No nurse. At least she left the pills. Another bottle in his hands, he swallowed a few of something or other. Gut shot. Gut shot in broad daylight in the city holding a camera with hundreds of witnesses. Some of the witnesses were drug crazed killers. Eh.

Oh. It hurt. He slumped across the room to the couch. Television. Crap. News and a warehouse getting shot up. There he was. Skull and Bones. There was Mercy. There was the Guiser. Carrying dead people. Nice of them to cart off the dead. Explosions and fire. Buzz’s blue and red butt hauled past a news camera. And here came the Horde. Nasty little cusses. They bit and scratched and shot and shrieked. And there in the background stood a man on a loading dock. A man with a pink pig mask. He knew the man was smiling. No mask could hide a smile that big.

That was no building jumper. No one was sick enough to fight crime in that get up. That was a bad guy, for sure. A happy bad guy. Porky. He’d tell them Porky was watching. A glutton for violence. A swine among purls. A dandy boar. Candy pig. Oh.

The longest nap crept up upon him. Second longest nap. Not time for that nap yet. Gut shot is not dead. The Dodger lives to film again, he thought. At least he shot something. Not like whatsisname who can’t hit the side of a broad boar if you paid him in nickels. The television barked. He turned it down.

Waving lights danced him to sleep.

News is fun, he thought.

Defense

If there’s a high wall around a house and defense becomes an issue, hunt up some building jumpers and mount some heavy caliber machine guns. This is a very basic strategy for home defense. You can embellish it as you wish.

The most useful type of building jumper has two things. Experience fighting The Big Ham Sammich (aka Fink) and his Horde of drug crazed indentured servants from the east, and a great shtick. Remember, the flashier the costume, the more outlandish the name the better.

Here are some of the crime fighters who hopped the wall at Mercy’s compound the day it got invaded: Cow Ninja, Kid Kosmos, Lame Wire, Dr. Eidolon, Miss Bombs, Captain Cryme, Chronos, Drunken Robot, Tent Gal, Mr. Rubbersuitman, Doc Finook, and of course, the Demon Crew featuring Mardi Gras (aka Harmless), Buzz Baldwin, Guise, American Boss, Dodger (aka Gutshot) and Mercy herself.

It’s better if you are well rested and uninjured. Again, referring to the Mercy compound, they had little time to prepare and most were beat up. As an aside, this whole thing could have been avoided if Mercy had installed the proper anti-surveillance devices like I asked her to. Turns out someone had a surgically implanted tracking pin in them. An RFID chip, for those of you in the know. GPS can be a superhero’s best friend or worst enemy.

Not that I’m putting blame on anyone. It sucked all around. It’s going to suck if your secret lair gets invaded by hundreds of meth toothed junkies. Just deal with it. Get the men and women up on the walls and start spraying rapid fire heat down on them.

One note about fighting The Horde. Technically, they are innocents when the board the ship from wherever, but once they land here and get all juiced up and start killing and eating, the guilty tag has to apply. It’s sad that they were looking for a better future and ended up working for a psycho in a pig mask, but this is what wars are. The innocent fight for pigs and die.

At this point in the game, you are well beyond using non-lethal suppression devices like pepper spray, tazers and tranq darts. It’s great if you want to capture someone and hand them over for analysis, but all it does is mess up the flow of combat. The enemy scatters and some are dead and stay dead while others rise up after a few minutes. Way too creepy for me. Plus you’d be shocked what a speedball will do for a one hundred pound starving woman who thinks you’re a demon turkey. They don’t quit.

They honestly believe we’re demons, and we’ve done nothing to dissuade them. Gaijin, they call us. White devils. Well, not all of us are white, but we are American. Good enough for them. We don’t mind. Hell, we’ve got a Skull as a frontman and the creepy ambulance that floats. Gimmicks, see? They might seem superfluous, but they create confusion and fear.

Excerpt from Hero 101, by Buzz Baldwin.

Chapter Seven | Chapter Nine